The Nightwatchman's Occurrence Book: And Other Comic InventionsPaperback, 9 July 2002

From the Nobel Prize-winning author comes two novels and a collection of stories that capture the rhythms of life in the Caribbean and England with impressive subtlety and humor.

"The world's writer, a master of language and perception." --*The New York Times Book Review
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The Suffrage of Elvira is Naipaul's hilarious take on an electoral campaign in the back country of Trinidad, where the candidates' tactics include blatant vote-buying and supernatural sabotage. The eponymous protagonist of Mr. Stone and the Knights Companion is an aging Englishman of ponderously regular habits whose life is thrown into upheaval by a sudden marriage and unanticipated professional advancement. And the stories in A Flag on the Island take us from a Chinese bakery in Trinidad--whose black proprietor faces bankruptcy until he takes a Chinese name--to a rooming house in London--where the genteel landlady plays a nasty Darwinian game with her budgerigars. Unfailingly stylish, filled with intelligence and feeling, here is the work of a writer who can do just about anything that can be done with language.