"Half a Life is the story of Willie Chandran, whose father, heeding the call of Mahatma Gandhi, turned his back on his brahmin heritage and married a woman of low caste - a disastrous union he would live to regret, as he would the children that issued from it. When Willie reache…
The son of a man who, inspired by Gandhi, married below his caste, travels to New York where he struggles to find his identity and forge a career as a writer.
Willie Chandran flees the heritage of his mixed class birth in India for the bohemian life of a writer in 1950s London. He falls in love with a woman and returns with her to Africa, living through the last days of colonialism.
The story of Willy Chandran, who moves from India to the immigrant community of post-war London, seeking something that will set him apart. Then his wife leads him to her home, a province of Portuguese Africa, a country whose inhabitants are all living out the last days of colon…
In a narrative that moves with dreamlike swiftness from India to England to Africa, Nobel Laureate V.S. Naipaul has produced his finest novel to date, a bleakly resonant study of the fraudulent bargains that make up an identity. The son of a Brahmin ascetic and his lower-caste w…
The story of Willy Chandran, who moves from India to the immigrant community of post-war London, seeking something that will set him apart. Then his wife leads him to her home, a province of Portuguese Africa, a country whose inhabitants are all living out the last days of colon…