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India: A Wounded Civilization
Series: Picador Collection
Brief Description
"A devastating work, but proof that a novelist of Naipaul's stature can often define problems quicker and more effectively than a team of economists and other experts" - The Times In 1964, V. S. Naipaul published An Area of Darkness, his semi-autobiographical account of a year...
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India: A Wounded Civilization
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A penetrating survey of the torment suffered across India in the late twentieth century, from one of the era's great literary heavyweights.
A penetrating survey of this tormented continent by one of the literary heavyweights of our age, republished here as part of the Picador Collection. Now part of the Picador Collection.
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Description
"A devastating work, but proof that a novelist of Naipaul's stature can often define problems quicker and more effectively than a team of economists and other experts" - The Times
In 1964, V. S. Naipaul published An Area of Darkness, his semi-autobiographical account of a year in India. Two visits later, prompted by the Emergency of 1975, he came to write India: A Wounded Civilization.
In this work, he casts a more analytical eye than before over Indian attitudes, while recapitulating and further probing the feelings aroused in him by this vast, mysterious, and agonised country. What he saw and heardβevoked so superbly and vividly in these pagesβreinforced in him a conviction that India, wounded by a thousand years of foreign rule, had not yet found an ideology of regeneration.
A work of fierce candour and precision, it is also a generous description of one man's complicated relationship with the country of his ancestors.
The second book in V. S. Naipaul's acclaimed Indian trilogy, India: A Wounded Civilization follows An Area of Darkness. The series concludes with India: A Million Mutinies Now.
Part of the Picador Collection, a series celebrating fifty years of Picador books and showcasing the best of modern literature.
Series: Picador Collection
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Book Details
INFORMATION
ISBN: 9781035061198
Publisher: Pan Macmillan
Format: Paperback / softback
Date Published: 12 June 2025
Country: United Kingdom
Imprint: Picador
Audience: General / adult
DIMENSIONS
Spine width: 11.0mm
Width: 130.0mm
Height: 198.0mm
Weight: 128g
Pages: 176
About the Author
V.S. Naipaul was born in Trinidad in 1932. He came to England on a scholarship in 1950. He spent four years at University College, Oxford, and began to write, in London, in 1954. He pursued no other profession. His novels include A House for Mr Biswas, The Mimic Men, Guerrillas, A Bend in the River, and The Enigma of Arrival. In 1971 he was awarded the Booker Prize for In a Free State. His works of nonfiction, equally acclaimed, include Among the Believers, Beyond Belief, The Masque of Africa, and a trio of books about India: An Area of Darkness, India: A Wounded Civilization, and India: A Million Mutinies Now. In 1990, V.S. Naipaul received a knighthood for services to literature; in 1993, he was the first recipient of the David Cohen British Literature Prize. He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2001. He lived with his wife Nadira and cat Augustus in Wiltshire, and died in 2018.
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