• Half a Life

  • A Novel
  • By: V. S. Naipaul
  • Narrated by: Neil Shah
  • Length: 7 hrs and 7 mins
  • 3.9 out of 5 stars (8 ratings)

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Half a Life  By  cover art

Half a Life

By: V. S. Naipaul
Narrated by: Neil Shah
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Publisher's summary

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 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. Brilliantly orchestrated, at once elegiac and devastating in its portraits of colonial grandeur and pretension, Half a Life represents the pinnacle of Naipaul's career.

©2018 V. S. Naipaul (P)2018 Blackstone Audio, Inc.

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