**Widely hailed as the Nobel Prize-winning author's greatest work, this
novel takes us into the life of a young Indian man who moves to an
isolated town at the bend of a great river in a newly independent
African nation. - "Brilliant." --*The New York Times
*Salim is doubly an outsider in his new home--an unnamed country that
resembles the Congo--by virtue of his origins in a community of Indian
merchants on the coast of East Africa. Uncertain of his future, he has
come to take possession of a local trading post he has naively purchased
sight unseen. But what Salim discovers on his arrival is a ghost town,
reduced to ruins in the wake of the recently departed European
colonizers and in the process of being reclaimed by the surrounding
forest. Salim struggles to build his business against a backdrop of
growing chaos, conflict, ignorance, and poverty. His is a journey into
the heart of Africa, into the same territory explored by Joseph Conrad's
Heart of Darkness nearly eighty years earlier--but witnessed this time
from the other side of the tragedy of colonization. Salim discovers that
the nation's violent legacy persists, through the rise of a dictator who
calls himself the people's savior but whose regime is built on fear and
lies. In this haunting masterpiece of postcolonial literature,
short-listed for the Booker Prize in 1979, Naipaul gives us a convincing
and disturbing vision of a place caught between the dangerously alluring
modern world and its own tenacious past.