In a Free State

Winner of the Booker Prize 1971 and nominated for the Golden Man Booker Prize in 2018.

A young Indian servant in Washington. An Asian West Indian in London. Both are far from home and both are desperately trying to build a new life in a deeply unfamiliar world. In between them lies the landscape of an unnamed country, a brutal place reminiscent of Idi Amin’s Uganda. This central story is about those who once thought of Africa as liberating, but now find themselves in an increasingly harsher reality.

Winner of the Booker Prize in 1971, In a Free State is one of Nobel Laureate V. S. Naipaul’s many towering literary achievements. It is a story of the desperation and heartbreak we find in those who are displaced and who try, often in vain, to make a home in their new surroundings. Frightening, disquieting and merciless, this is one of Naipaul’s greatest novels: fraught but full of pity.

Part of the Picador Collection, a series showcasing the very best of modern literature.