The World Is What It Is: The Authorized Biography of V.S. Naipaul

Beginning in rich detail in Trinidad, where Naipaul was born into an Indian family, Patrick French skillfully examines Naipaul' s life within a displaced community and his fierce ambition at school. He describes how, on scholarship at Oxford, homesickness and depression struck with great force; the ways in which Naipaul's first wife helped him to cope and their otherwise fraught marriage; and Naipaul's struggles throughout subsequent uncertainties in England, including his twenty-five-year-long affair.

Naipaul's extraordinary gift--producing, uniquely, masterpieces of both fiction and nonfiction--is most of all born of a forceful, visionary impulse, whose roots French traces with a sympathetic brilliance and devastating insight.