Between Father and Son

In 1950, after winning a scholarship from the government of Trinidad, V. S. Naipaul, aged seventeen, left home for the first time. Following a two-week journey by steamer, he arrived in Oxford, England, a world utterly removed from the one he had longed to escape and to which he would never really return. This extraordinary collection of letters gives us, as nothing published previously has, an intimate view of Naipaul's formative years. It is a story of family members oceans apart, clinging to one another against the sadness of dislocation and isolation: The young Naipaul, desperate not for a degree but to become a writer and make his way in the world. His beloved sister Kamla, anxious and bewildered, away at school in India. And his melancholy but loving father, whose own broken dream of succeeding as a writer would be realized in the singular achievement of his son. With the satisfactions of a novel, Between Father and Son portrays a deeply affecting family drama, even as it bears witness to the flowering of one of the great literary geniuses of the century.