
A Bend in the River
Failed to add items
Add to Cart failed.
Add to Wish List failed.
Remove from wishlist failed.
Adding to library failed
Follow podcast failed
Unfollow podcast failed
Buy for $17.16
No default payment method selected.
We are sorry. We are not allowed to sell this product with the selected payment method
-
Narrated by:
-
Simon Vance
-
By:
-
V. S. Naipaul
About this listen
Listeners also enjoyed...
-
A House for Mr. Biswas
- By: V. S. Naipaul
- Narrated by: Sam Dastor
- Length: 21 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
A House for Mr. Biswas, by Nobel and Booker Prize-winning author V. S. Naipaul, is a powerful novel about one man's struggle for identity and belonging. Born into poverty, then trapped in the shackles of charity and gratitude, Mr. Biswas longs for a house he can call his own. He loathes his wife and her wealthy family, upon whom he is dependent. Finding himself a mere accessory on their estate, his constant rebellion is motivated by the one thing that can symbolize his independence.
-
-
Performance makes a fatal mistake. No Trini accent
- By Christopher on 01-04-19
By: V. S. Naipaul
-
A Way in the World
- A Novel
- By: V. S. Naipaul
- Narrated by: Simon Vance
- Length: 11 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Spanning continents and centuries and defying literary categories, A Way in the World tells intersecting stories whose protagonists include the disgraced and half-demented Sir Walter Raleigh, who seeks El Dorado in the New World; the 19th-century insurgent Francisco Miranda, who becomes entangled in his own fantasies and borrowed ideas; and the doomed Blair, a present-day Caribbean revolutionary stranded in East Africa.
-
-
ugh!
- By Norman Johnson on 09-16-18
By: V. S. Naipaul
-
In a Free State
- By: V. S. Naipaul
- Narrated by: Vikas Adam, Neil Shah, Simon Vance
- Length: 9 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
On a road trip through Africa, two English people - Bobby, a civil servant with a guilty appetite for African boys; and Linda, a supercilious "compound wife" - are driving back to their enclave after a stay in the capital. But in between lies the landscape of an unnamed country whose squalor and ethnic bloodletting suggest Idi Amin's Uganda. And the farther Naipaul's protagonists travel into it, the more they find themselves crossing the line that separates privileged outsiders from horrified victims.
-
-
Magical Prose …
- By Saman on 07-19-18
By: V. S. Naipaul
-
An Area of Darkness
- By: V. S. Naipaul
- Narrated by: Simon Vance
- Length: 10 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
A classic of modern travel writing, An Area of Darkness is Nobel Laureate V. S. Naipaul’s profound reckoning with his ancestral homeland and an extraordinarily perceptive chronicle of his first encounter with India. Traveling from the bureaucratic morass of Bombay to the ethereal beauty of Kashmir, from a sacred ice cave in the Himalayas to an abandoned temple near Madras, Naipaul encounters a dizzying cross-section of humanity: browbeaten government workers and imperious servants, a suavely self-serving holy man, and a deluded American religious seeker.
-
-
Go slowly with this one, or it's a slog
- By John S. on 08-15-21
By: V. S. Naipaul
-
The Enigma of Arrival
- By: V. S. Naipaul
- Narrated by: Simon Vance
- Length: 13 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The story of a writer's singular journey - from one place to another, from the British colony of Trinidad to the ancient countryside of England, and from one state of mind to another - is perhaps Naipaul's most autobiographical work. Yet it is also woven through with remarkable invention to make it a rich and complex novel.
-
-
A noveau novel
- By Chike M Nzerue on 05-02-20
By: V. S. Naipaul
-
The Adventures of Augie March
- By: Saul Bellow
- Narrated by: Tom Parker
- Length: 22 hrs and 13 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Augie is a poor but exuberant boy growing up in Chicago during the Depression. While his friends all settle into chosen professions, Augie demands a special destiny. He tests out a wild succession of occupations, proudly rejecting each as too limiting - until he tangles with the glamorous perfectionist Thea.
-
-
THAT part of the Universe visible from Chicago!
- By Darwin8u on 05-09-12
By: Saul Bellow
-
A House for Mr. Biswas
- By: V. S. Naipaul
- Narrated by: Sam Dastor
- Length: 21 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
A House for Mr. Biswas, by Nobel and Booker Prize-winning author V. S. Naipaul, is a powerful novel about one man's struggle for identity and belonging. Born into poverty, then trapped in the shackles of charity and gratitude, Mr. Biswas longs for a house he can call his own. He loathes his wife and her wealthy family, upon whom he is dependent. Finding himself a mere accessory on their estate, his constant rebellion is motivated by the one thing that can symbolize his independence.
-
-
Performance makes a fatal mistake. No Trini accent
- By Christopher on 01-04-19
By: V. S. Naipaul
-
A Way in the World
- A Novel
- By: V. S. Naipaul
- Narrated by: Simon Vance
- Length: 11 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Spanning continents and centuries and defying literary categories, A Way in the World tells intersecting stories whose protagonists include the disgraced and half-demented Sir Walter Raleigh, who seeks El Dorado in the New World; the 19th-century insurgent Francisco Miranda, who becomes entangled in his own fantasies and borrowed ideas; and the doomed Blair, a present-day Caribbean revolutionary stranded in East Africa.
-
-
ugh!
- By Norman Johnson on 09-16-18
By: V. S. Naipaul
-
In a Free State
- By: V. S. Naipaul
- Narrated by: Vikas Adam, Neil Shah, Simon Vance
- Length: 9 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
On a road trip through Africa, two English people - Bobby, a civil servant with a guilty appetite for African boys; and Linda, a supercilious "compound wife" - are driving back to their enclave after a stay in the capital. But in between lies the landscape of an unnamed country whose squalor and ethnic bloodletting suggest Idi Amin's Uganda. And the farther Naipaul's protagonists travel into it, the more they find themselves crossing the line that separates privileged outsiders from horrified victims.
-
-
Magical Prose …
- By Saman on 07-19-18
By: V. S. Naipaul
-
An Area of Darkness
- By: V. S. Naipaul
- Narrated by: Simon Vance
- Length: 10 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
A classic of modern travel writing, An Area of Darkness is Nobel Laureate V. S. Naipaul’s profound reckoning with his ancestral homeland and an extraordinarily perceptive chronicle of his first encounter with India. Traveling from the bureaucratic morass of Bombay to the ethereal beauty of Kashmir, from a sacred ice cave in the Himalayas to an abandoned temple near Madras, Naipaul encounters a dizzying cross-section of humanity: browbeaten government workers and imperious servants, a suavely self-serving holy man, and a deluded American religious seeker.
-
-
Go slowly with this one, or it's a slog
- By John S. on 08-15-21
By: V. S. Naipaul
-
The Enigma of Arrival
- By: V. S. Naipaul
- Narrated by: Simon Vance
- Length: 13 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The story of a writer's singular journey - from one place to another, from the British colony of Trinidad to the ancient countryside of England, and from one state of mind to another - is perhaps Naipaul's most autobiographical work. Yet it is also woven through with remarkable invention to make it a rich and complex novel.
-
-
A noveau novel
- By Chike M Nzerue on 05-02-20
By: V. S. Naipaul
-
The Adventures of Augie March
- By: Saul Bellow
- Narrated by: Tom Parker
- Length: 22 hrs and 13 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Augie is a poor but exuberant boy growing up in Chicago during the Depression. While his friends all settle into chosen professions, Augie demands a special destiny. He tests out a wild succession of occupations, proudly rejecting each as too limiting - until he tangles with the glamorous perfectionist Thea.
-
-
THAT part of the Universe visible from Chicago!
- By Darwin8u on 05-09-12
By: Saul Bellow
-
A High Wind in Jamaica
- By: Richard Hughes
- Narrated by: Michael Maloney
- Length: 6 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Set in the 19th century against a backdrop of island life and the vast surrounding seas, A High Wind in Jamaica is the gripping story of the Bas-Thornton children, whose parents send them back to England following a hurricane in the postcolonial Caribbean they call home. Having set sail, the children quickly fall into the hands of pirates. As their voyage continues, things take an awful turn
-
-
Prose that reads like a Child's Fever Dream
- By Darwin8u on 01-02-17
By: Richard Hughes
-
The Ghost Writer
- The Nathan Zuckerman Series, Book 1
- By: Philip Roth
- Narrated by: Malcolm Hillgartner
- Length: 4 hrs and 31 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The Ghost Writer introduces Nathan Zuckerman in the 1950s, a budding writer infatuated with the great books, discovering the contradictory claims of literature and experience while an overnight guest in the secluded New England farmhouse of his idol, E. I. Lonoff. At Lonoff's, Zuckerman meets Amy Bellette, a haunting young woman of indeterminate foreign background who turns out to be a former student of Lonoff's and who may also have been his mistress.
-
-
Turning Sentences Around
- By Darwin8u on 01-28-17
By: Philip Roth
-
From Here to Eternity
- By: James Jones
- Narrated by: Elijah Alexander
- Length: 36 hrs and 50 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Diamond Head, Hawaii, 1941. Pvt. Robert E. Lee Prewitt is a champion welterweight and a fine bugler. But when he refuses to join the company's boxing team, he gets "the treatment" that may break him or kill him. First Sgt. Milton Anthony Warden knows how to soldier better than almost anyone, yet he's risking his career to have an affair with the commanding officer's wife. Both Warden and Prewitt are bound by a common bond: the Army is their heart and blood...and, possibly, their death.
-
-
Genius on Every Level
- By aaron on 06-13-13
By: James Jones
-
Sons and Lovers
- By: D. H. Lawrence
- Narrated by: Simon Vance
- Length: 16 hrs and 31 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Sons and Lovers, D. H. Lawrence's first major novel, was also the first in the English language to explore ordinary working-class life from the inside. No writer before or since has written so well about the intimacies enforced by a tightly knit mining community and by a family where feelings are never hidden for long. When the marriage between Walter Morel and his sensitive, high-minded wife begins to break down, the bitterness of their frustration seeps into their children's lives.
-
-
Momma's Boy (The Dangers of Overbearing Parenting)
- By W Perry Hall on 02-01-14
By: D. H. Lawrence
-
Midnight's Children
- By: Salman Rushdie
- Narrated by: Lyndam Gregory
- Length: 24 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Salman Rushdie holds the literary world in awe with a jaw-dropping catalog of critically acclaimed novels that have made him one of the world's most celebrated authors. Winner of the prestigious Booker of Bookers, Midnight's Children tells the story of Saleem Sinai, born on the stroke of India's independence.
-
-
Outstanding book, superb narration
- By MarcS on 06-09-09
By: Salman Rushdie
-
Ironweed
- By: William Kennedy
- Narrated by: Jonathan Davis
- Length: 8 hrs
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Francis Phelan, ex-ballplayer, part-time gravedigger, full-time drunk, has hit bottom. Years ago he left Albany in a hurry after killing a scab during a trolley workers' strike; he ran away again after accidentally – and fatally – dropping his infant son. Now, in 1938, Francis is back in town, roaming the old familiar streets with his hobo pal, Helen, trying to make peace with the ghosts of the past and the present.
-
-
Darkly Lovely
- By Michael on 07-22-17
By: William Kennedy
-
Parable of the Sower
- By: Octavia E. Butler
- Narrated by: Lynne Thigpen
- Length: 12 hrs
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
God is change. That is the central truth of the Earthseed movement, whose unlikely prophet is 18-year-old Lauren Olamina. The young woman's diary entries tell the story of her life amid a violent 21st-century hell of walled neighborhoods and drug-crazed pyromaniacs - and reveal her evolving Earthseed philosophy. Against a backdrop of horror emerges a message of hope: if we are willing to embrace divine change, we will survive to fulfill our destiny among the stars.
-
-
Dystopia before dystopia was cool...
- By Amber on 05-28-14
-
Waiting for the Barbarians
- By: J. M. Coetzee
- Narrated by: Andrew Wincott
- Length: 7 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
For decades the Magistrate has been a loyal servant of the Empire, running the affairs of a tiny frontier settlement and ignoring the impending war with the barbarians. When interrogation experts arrive, however, he witnesses the Empire's cruel and unjust treatment of prisoners of war. Jolted into sympathy for their victims, he commits a quixotic act of rebellion that brands him an enemy of the state.
-
-
An Interesting Read For The Current Times
- By Jen on 04-05-20
By: J. M. Coetzee
-
The Good Soldier
- By: Ford Madox Ford
- Narrated by: Gildart Jackson
- Length: 7 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Handsome, wealthy, and a veteran of service in India, Captain Edward Ashburnham appears to be the ideal "good soldier" and the embodiment of English upper-class virtues. But for his creator, Ford Madox Ford, he also represents the corruption at society's core. Beneath Ashburnham's charming, polished exterior lurks a soul well-versed in the arts of deception, hypocrisy, and betrayal.
-
-
A tragic, dramatic classic
- By Adeliese Baumann on 10-24-13
By: Ford Madox Ford
-
Barkskins
- A Novel
- By: Annie Proulx
- Narrated by: Robert Petkoff
- Length: 25 hrs and 53 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In the late 17th century, two young Frenchmen, René Sel and Charles Duquet, arrive in New France. Bound to a feudal lord for three years in exchange for land, they become wood-cutters — barkskins. René suffers extraordinary hardship, oppressed by the forest he is charged with clearing. He is forced to marry a native woman and their descendants live trapped between two cultures. But Duquet runs away, becomes a fur trader, then sets up a timber business. Annie Proulx tells the stories of the descendants of Sel and Duquet over 300 years.
-
-
Awe-Inspiring, Far-Reaching Epic
- By W Perry Hall on 06-30-16
By: Annie Proulx
-
Exit West
- A Novel
- By: Mohsin Hamid
- Narrated by: Mohsin Hamid
- Length: 4 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In a country teetering on the brink of civil war, two young people meet - sensual, fiercely independent Nadia and gentle, restrained Saeed. They embark on a furtive love affair, and are soon cloistered in a premature intimacy by the unrest roiling their city. When it explodes, turning familiar streets into a patchwork of checkpoints and bomb blasts, they begin to hear whispers about doors - doors that can whisk people far away, if perilously and for a price. As the violence escalates, Nadia and Saeed decide that they no longer have a choice.
-
-
Where to Live?
- By David on 04-04-17
By: Mohsin Hamid
-
Trinity
- By: Leon Uris
- Narrated by: John Keating
- Length: 34 hrs and 13 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
From the acclaimed author who enthralled the world with Exodus, Battle Cry, QB VII, Topaz, and other beloved classics of twentieth-century fiction comes a sweeping and powerful epic adventure that captures the "terrible beauty" of Ireland during its long and bloody struggle for freedom. It is the electrifying story of an idealistic young Catholic rebel and the valiant and beautiful Protestant girl who defied her heritage to join his cause. It is a tale of love and danger, of triumph at an unthinkable cost.
-
-
FINALLY!!!!
- By Meaghan Bynum on 04-02-18
By: Leon Uris
Critic reviews
"A brilliant novel." (The New York Times)
"Confirms Naipaul's position as one of the best writers now at work." (Newsweek)
People who viewed this also viewed...
-
A House for Mr. Biswas
- By: V. S. Naipaul
- Narrated by: Sam Dastor
- Length: 21 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
A House for Mr. Biswas, by Nobel and Booker Prize-winning author V. S. Naipaul, is a powerful novel about one man's struggle for identity and belonging. Born into poverty, then trapped in the shackles of charity and gratitude, Mr. Biswas longs for a house he can call his own. He loathes his wife and her wealthy family, upon whom he is dependent. Finding himself a mere accessory on their estate, his constant rebellion is motivated by the one thing that can symbolize his independence.
-
-
Performance makes a fatal mistake. No Trini accent
- By Christopher on 01-04-19
By: V. S. Naipaul
-
India: A Wounded Civilization
- By: V. S. Naipaul
- Narrated by: Sam Dastor
- Length: 6 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In 1975, at the height of Indira Gandhi’s “Emergency”, V. S. Naipaul returned to India, the country his ancestors had left 100 years earlier. Out of that journey he produced this concise masterpiece: a vibrant, defiantly unsentimental portrait of a society traumatized by centuries of foreign conquest and immured in a mythic vision of its past.
-
-
Insightful & informative!
- By Kindle Customer on 05-03-24
By: V. S. Naipaul
-
India: A Million Mutinies Now
- By: V. S. Naipaul
- Narrated by: Sam Dastor
- Length: 24 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Arising out of Naipaul’s lifelong obsession and passion for a country that is at once his and totally alien, India: A Million Mutinies Now relates the stories of many of the people he met traveling there more than 50 years ago. He explores how they have been steered by the innumerable frictions present in Indian society - the contradictions and compromises of religious faith, the whim and chaos of random political forces.
-
-
AN ABSOLUTE MUST READ
- By JK on 08-15-21
By: V. S. Naipaul
-
Guerrillas
- By: V. S. Naipaul
- Narrated by: Ron Butler
- Length: 10 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
On an unnamed Caribbean Island, political tensions provoked by race and poverty are high. Jimmy Ahmed, a young mixed-race man, has been hailed as a revolutionary leader of the people. Roche, imprisoned for activities against South Africa's apartheid regime, and Jane, a feckless English rich girl wanting to feel a part of something bigger, get sucked into the turmoil and world of Ahmed. But does anyone achieve anything by causing unrest? Do any of them really want freedom in a new society or just the old society with themselves at the helm of power?
-
-
Reactionary Islamophobia 101
- By Kobugi on 03-13-20
By: V. S. Naipaul
-
An Area of Darkness
- By: V. S. Naipaul
- Narrated by: Simon Vance
- Length: 10 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
A classic of modern travel writing, An Area of Darkness is Nobel Laureate V. S. Naipaul’s profound reckoning with his ancestral homeland and an extraordinarily perceptive chronicle of his first encounter with India. Traveling from the bureaucratic morass of Bombay to the ethereal beauty of Kashmir, from a sacred ice cave in the Himalayas to an abandoned temple near Madras, Naipaul encounters a dizzying cross-section of humanity: browbeaten government workers and imperious servants, a suavely self-serving holy man, and a deluded American religious seeker.
-
-
Go slowly with this one, or it's a slog
- By John S. on 08-15-21
By: V. S. Naipaul
-
In a Free State
- By: V. S. Naipaul
- Narrated by: Vikas Adam, Neil Shah, Simon Vance
- Length: 9 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
On a road trip through Africa, two English people - Bobby, a civil servant with a guilty appetite for African boys; and Linda, a supercilious "compound wife" - are driving back to their enclave after a stay in the capital. But in between lies the landscape of an unnamed country whose squalor and ethnic bloodletting suggest Idi Amin's Uganda. And the farther Naipaul's protagonists travel into it, the more they find themselves crossing the line that separates privileged outsiders from horrified victims.
-
-
Magical Prose …
- By Saman on 07-19-18
By: V. S. Naipaul
-
A House for Mr. Biswas
- By: V. S. Naipaul
- Narrated by: Sam Dastor
- Length: 21 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
A House for Mr. Biswas, by Nobel and Booker Prize-winning author V. S. Naipaul, is a powerful novel about one man's struggle for identity and belonging. Born into poverty, then trapped in the shackles of charity and gratitude, Mr. Biswas longs for a house he can call his own. He loathes his wife and her wealthy family, upon whom he is dependent. Finding himself a mere accessory on their estate, his constant rebellion is motivated by the one thing that can symbolize his independence.
-
-
Performance makes a fatal mistake. No Trini accent
- By Christopher on 01-04-19
By: V. S. Naipaul
-
India: A Wounded Civilization
- By: V. S. Naipaul
- Narrated by: Sam Dastor
- Length: 6 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In 1975, at the height of Indira Gandhi’s “Emergency”, V. S. Naipaul returned to India, the country his ancestors had left 100 years earlier. Out of that journey he produced this concise masterpiece: a vibrant, defiantly unsentimental portrait of a society traumatized by centuries of foreign conquest and immured in a mythic vision of its past.
-
-
Insightful & informative!
- By Kindle Customer on 05-03-24
By: V. S. Naipaul
-
India: A Million Mutinies Now
- By: V. S. Naipaul
- Narrated by: Sam Dastor
- Length: 24 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Arising out of Naipaul’s lifelong obsession and passion for a country that is at once his and totally alien, India: A Million Mutinies Now relates the stories of many of the people he met traveling there more than 50 years ago. He explores how they have been steered by the innumerable frictions present in Indian society - the contradictions and compromises of religious faith, the whim and chaos of random political forces.
-
-
AN ABSOLUTE MUST READ
- By JK on 08-15-21
By: V. S. Naipaul
-
Guerrillas
- By: V. S. Naipaul
- Narrated by: Ron Butler
- Length: 10 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
On an unnamed Caribbean Island, political tensions provoked by race and poverty are high. Jimmy Ahmed, a young mixed-race man, has been hailed as a revolutionary leader of the people. Roche, imprisoned for activities against South Africa's apartheid regime, and Jane, a feckless English rich girl wanting to feel a part of something bigger, get sucked into the turmoil and world of Ahmed. But does anyone achieve anything by causing unrest? Do any of them really want freedom in a new society or just the old society with themselves at the helm of power?
-
-
Reactionary Islamophobia 101
- By Kobugi on 03-13-20
By: V. S. Naipaul
-
An Area of Darkness
- By: V. S. Naipaul
- Narrated by: Simon Vance
- Length: 10 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
A classic of modern travel writing, An Area of Darkness is Nobel Laureate V. S. Naipaul’s profound reckoning with his ancestral homeland and an extraordinarily perceptive chronicle of his first encounter with India. Traveling from the bureaucratic morass of Bombay to the ethereal beauty of Kashmir, from a sacred ice cave in the Himalayas to an abandoned temple near Madras, Naipaul encounters a dizzying cross-section of humanity: browbeaten government workers and imperious servants, a suavely self-serving holy man, and a deluded American religious seeker.
-
-
Go slowly with this one, or it's a slog
- By John S. on 08-15-21
By: V. S. Naipaul
-
In a Free State
- By: V. S. Naipaul
- Narrated by: Vikas Adam, Neil Shah, Simon Vance
- Length: 9 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
On a road trip through Africa, two English people - Bobby, a civil servant with a guilty appetite for African boys; and Linda, a supercilious "compound wife" - are driving back to their enclave after a stay in the capital. But in between lies the landscape of an unnamed country whose squalor and ethnic bloodletting suggest Idi Amin's Uganda. And the farther Naipaul's protagonists travel into it, the more they find themselves crossing the line that separates privileged outsiders from horrified victims.
-
-
Magical Prose …
- By Saman on 07-19-18
By: V. S. Naipaul
-
Beyond Belief
- By: V.S. Naipaul
- Narrated by: Raj Ghatak
- Length: 19 hrs and 17 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Fourteen years after the publication of his landmark travel narrative Among the Believers, V.S. Naipaul returned to the four non-Arab Islamic countries he reported on so vividly at the time of Ayatollah Khomeini’s triumph in Iran. Beyond Belief is the result of his five-month journey in 1995 through lands where descendants of Muslim converts live at odds with indigenous traditions.
By: V.S. Naipaul
-
Among the Believers
- By: V.S. Naipaul
- Narrated by: Raj Ghatak
- Length: 18 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
With all the narrative power and intellectual authority that have distinguished his earlier books, V.S. Naipaul explores the life, the culture, the ferment inside the nations of Islam–in a book that combines the fascinations of great travel literature with the insights of a uniquely sharp, original and idiosyncratic political mind.
By: V.S. Naipaul
-
The Mystic Masseur
- A Novel
- By: V. S. Naipaul
- Narrated by: Ron Butler
- Length: 7 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In this slyly funny and lavishly inventive novel, Nobel Prize winner V. S. Naipaul traces the unlikely career of Ganesh Ramsumair, a failed schoolteacher and impecunious village masseur who in time becomes a revered mystic, a thriving entrepreneur, and the most beloved politician in Trinidad. Witty, tender, filled with the sights, sounds, and smells of Trinidad's dusty Indian villages, The Mystic Masseur is Naipaul at his most expansive and evocative.
-
-
Pretty Good
- By Joan on 09-23-19
By: V. S. Naipaul
-
Magic Seeds
- By: V. S. Naipaul
- Narrated by: Aasif Mandvi
- Length: 9 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Nobel Prize-winner V. S. Naipaul, one of the world's most acclaimed authors, effortlessly tackles provocative ideas that lesser novelists shy away from and always leaves his audience with something to think about.
-
-
Read Half a Life first
- By Alison on 02-22-05
By: V. S. Naipaul
-
Miguel Street
- By: V. S. Naipaul
- Narrated by: Ron Butler
- Length: 5 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
"A stranger could drive through Miguel Street and just say 'Slum!' because he could see no more." But to its residents, this derelict corner of Trinidad's capital is a complete world, where everybody is quite different from everybody else. In this tender, funny early novel, V. S. Naipaul renders their lives (and the legends their neighbors construct around them) with Dickensian verve and Chekhovian compassion.
-
-
Mixed feelings.
- By anton on 10-27-18
By: V. S. Naipaul
-
The Enigma of Arrival
- By: V. S. Naipaul
- Narrated by: Simon Vance
- Length: 13 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The story of a writer's singular journey - from one place to another, from the British colony of Trinidad to the ancient countryside of England, and from one state of mind to another - is perhaps Naipaul's most autobiographical work. Yet it is also woven through with remarkable invention to make it a rich and complex novel.
-
-
A noveau novel
- By Chike M Nzerue on 05-02-20
By: V. S. Naipaul
-
Set the Night on Fire
- By: Libby Fischer Hellmann
- Narrated by: Diane Piron Gelman
- Length: 10 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Someone is trying to kill Lila Hilliard. During the Christmas holidays she returns from running errands to find her family home in flames, her father and brother trapped inside. Later, she is attacked by a mysterious man on a motorcycle... and the threats don't end there. As Lila desperately tries to piece together who is after her and why, she uncovers information about her father's past in Chicago during the volatile days of the late 1960s... information he never shared with her, but now threatens to destroy her.
-
-
Excellent Mystery / Thriller
- By Snoodely on 11-04-13
-
Half a Life
- A Novel
- By: V. S. Naipaul
- Narrated by: Neil Shah
- Length: 7 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The son of a Brahmin ascetic and his lower-caste wife, Willie Chandran grows up sensing the hollowness at the core of his father's self-denial and vowing to live more authentically. That search takes him to the immigrant and literary bohemias of 1950s London, to a facile and unsatisfying career as a writer, and at last to a decaying Portuguese colony in East Africa, where he finds a happiness he will then be compelled to betray.
By: V. S. Naipaul
-
A Writer's People
- Ways of Looking and Feeling
- By: V. S. Naipaul
- Narrated by: Simon Vance
- Length: 5 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In a probing narrative that is part meditation and part remembrance, Nobel Laureate V. S. Naipaul shares how his process of creative and intellectual assimilation across various cultures has shaped both his writing and his life. Naipaul discusses the writers to whom he was exposed early on and his first encounters with literary culture.
By: V. S. Naipaul
-
Nostromo
- By: Joseph Conrad
- Narrated by: John Lee
- Length: 17 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Joseph Conrad’s multilayered masterpiece tells of one nation's violent revolution and one hero's moral degeneration. Conrad convincingly invents an entire country, Costaguana, and sets it afire as warlords compete for power and a fortune in silver.
Señor Gould, adamant that his silver should not become spoil for his enemies, entrusts it to his faithful longshoreman, Nostromo, a local hero of sorts whom Señor Gould believes to be incorruptible.
-
-
An Almost PERFECT Novel.
- By Darwin8u on 05-09-12
By: Joseph Conrad
-
The Brothers Karamazov
- (Bicentennial Edition)
- By: Fyodor Dostoevsky, Richard Pevear - translator, Larissa Volokhonsky - translator
- Narrated by: Ben Miles
- Length: 42 hrs and 16 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The Brothers Karamazov is a murder mystery, a courtroom drama, and an exploration of erotic rivalry in a series of triangular love affairs involving the “wicked and sentimental” Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov and his three sons—the impulsive and sensual Dmitri; the coldly rational Ivan; and the healthy, red-cheeked young novice Alyosha. Through the gripping events of their story, Dostoevsky portrays the whole of Russian life, is social and spiritual striving, in what was both the golden age and a tragic turning point in Russian culture.
-
-
Well Worth Your Time
- By Scole on 12-06-24
By: Fyodor Dostoevsky, and others
-
The Overstory
- By: Richard Powers
- Narrated by: Suzanne Toren
- Length: 22 hrs and 58 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The Overstory unfolds in concentric rings of interlocking fable that range from antebellum New York to the late 20th-century Timber Wars of the Pacific Northwest and beyond. An air force loadmaster in the Vietnam War is shot out of the sky, then saved by falling into a banyan. An artist inherits 100 years of photographic portraits, all of the same doomed American chestnut. A hard-partying undergraduate in the late 1980s electrocutes herself, dies, and is sent back into life by creatures of air and light.
-
-
eye opening
- By Michael Stansberry on 05-23-18
By: Richard Powers
confusing
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
terrifying
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
A curious journey
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
Naipaul was a good observer. His bitter and pessimistic impressions verge on a racist dismissal of Africa and Africans, as many have observed. But the book is pretty nuanced, and Zairian politics were undeniably horrific.
Nepal‘s writing is beautiful but the book is a bit formless. It has a lot of social/political exposition, which is very interesting, but loses the track of the narrative. The violence of the protagonist’s affair with the European woman is weird and gratuitous. The narrator remains a bit of a mystery.
Fascinating historical document
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
The novel helps the reader to understand how events like the Rwandan Genocide could happen and see its roots in the "White Hyacinth" (one of the central symbols) that crept down river from the west. Since the narrator (wise and experienced as he is) can speak only from his limited persepctive, symbol and metaphor supply the nuances. The novel also reminds us that "Africa" is a diverse continent, not one homogenous place. The novel surpasses its setting as a reflection on the nature of human power and domination, as well as resilience.
While it isn't an action novel, as someone else pointed out, the second half IS a gripping listen and accessible. Don't expect a "pat" ending, though.
This is the first Naipaul novel I've read/listened to, but I can see why his Nobel Prize citation praised him for relating the hidden, forgotten histories in literary form.
immersion in postcolonial Africa
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
Racist, but...
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
Amazing insight into an unknowable
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
Naispul brilliantly describes the delicate relationships between the various African ethnic groups and nationalities, those people's interactions with expatriates and among the expatriates themselves. He describes a country (likely to be contemporary DR Congo) in moral, institutional and cultural decay and confusion resulting from the sudden changes that the country has to go through.
It is an honest and realistic portrait of postcolonial Africa written in an rich, sometimes poetic, language that leaves one with the feeling of actually being there in person.
Simon Vance delivers a nice performance that catches very well the spirit and the tone of the book.
A crash course in postcolonial Africa.
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
A tale to think about
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
OK, is the Narrator from 1926?
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.