The World Is What It Is Paperback by Patrick French

Product Details

• Publisher: Penguin Canada (2009-12-29)
• Language: English
• Paperback: 592 pages
• ISBN-13: 9780143017653
• Item Weight: 557.93 grams
• Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.5 x 1.6 cm

Beginning with a richly detailed portrait of Naipaul's childhood in Trinidad, Patrick French gives us the boy born to an Indian family who possesses an extraordinary gift for writing and a forceful, visionary impulse. Fiercely ambitious, Naipaul wins a scholarship to Oxford at age seventeen. London in the 1950s wins him his first literary success, but homesickness almost defeats him. He copes with the aid of Patricia Hale, his first wife, an Englishwoman who will stand by him for four decades, even as he embarks on a twenty-four-year love affair that will feed his dizzying creativity. Researched with the full cooperation of its Nobel Prize—winning subject and informed by exclusive access to the subject's private papers and personal recollections, French's revelatory biography does full justice to an enigmatic genius.

About the Author

Patrick French was born in England in 1966 and studied literature at Edinburgh University. He is the author of Younghusband, Liberty or Death and Tibet, Tibet, and is a winner of the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award, the Royal Society of Literature Heinemann Prize and the Somerset Maugham Award.