The Masque of Africa Paperback by V. S. Naipaul

Product Details

• Publisher: Vintage Canada (2011-10-04)
• Language: English
• Paperback: 256 pages
• ISBN-13: 9780307399960
• Item Weight: 255.15 grams
• Dimensions: 8.0 x 5.14 x 0.79 cm

Understanding Africa is critical for all concerned with the world today: in what promises to be his final great work of reportage, one of the keenest observers of the continent surveys the effects of belief and religion on the disparate peoples of Africa.

The Masque of Africa is Nobel Prize-winning V. S. Naipaul's first major work of non-fiction to be published since his internationally bestselling Beyond Belief. Like all of Naipaul's great works of non-fiction, The Masque of Africa is superficially a book of travels — full of people, stories and landscapes he visits — but it also encompasses a larger narrative and purpose: to judge the effects of belief (whether in indigenous animisms, faiths imposed by other cultures, or even the cults of leaders and mythical history) upon the progress of civilization.

About the Author

V. S. NAIPAUL was born in Trinidad in 1932. He went to England on a scholarship in 1950. After four years at University College, Oxford, he began to write, and since then he has followed no other profession. He has published more than twenty books of fiction and non-fiction, including A House for Mr. Biswas, A Bend in the River and A Turn in the South, and a collection of letters, Between Father and Son. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2001.