In the "brilliant novel" () V.S. Naipaul takes us deeply into the life of one man—an Indian who, uprooted by the bloody tides of Third World history, has come to live in an isolated town at the bend of a great river in a newly independent African nation. Naipaul gives us the most convincing and disturbing vision yet of what happens in a place caught between the dangerously alluring modern world and its own tenacious past and traditions.

"Naipaul has constructed a marvelous prose epic that matches the best nineteenth-century novels for richness of comic insight and final, tragic power." – Newsweek – Review

A gripping masterpiece, hailed as one of the 20th century's finest novels

A HOUSE FOR MR BISWAS is V.S. Naipaul's unforgettable third novel. Born the "wrong way" and thrust into a world that greeted him with little more than a bad omen, Mohun Biswas has spent his 46 years of life striving for independence. But his determined efforts have met only with calamity. Shuttled from one residence to another after the drowning of his father, Mr Biswas yearns for a place he can call home. He marries into the domineering Tulsi family, on whom he becomes indignantly dependent, but rebels and takes on a succession of occupations in an arduous struggle to weaken their hold over him and purchase a house of his own. Heartrending and darkly comic, A HOUSE FOR MR BISWAS masterfully evokes a man's quest for autonomy against the backdrop of post-colonial Trinidad.

Winner of 1971 Booker Prize

«V. S. Naipaul tells stories which show us ourselves and the reality we live in. His use of language is as precise as it is beautiful.» – The London Times

«A Tolstoyan spirit…The so-called Third World has produced no more brilliant literary artist.» – John Updike, The New Yorker

«The coolest literary eye and the most lucid prose we have.» – The New York Review

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 — this is perhaps Naipaul's most autobiographical work. Yet it is also woven through with remarkable invention to make it a rich and complex novel.