"Naipaul offers a liberating frankness. It's a rare and oddly exhilarating thing to encounter a master so manifestly unconcerned with being liked . . . The reputations of Austen, James and Hardy, after all, will most likely survive Naipaul's disdain, but if even one outraged devotee of those giants is turned on to Bond or Selvon or Chaudhuri, then A Writer's People will have done a noble service." - "Ottawa Citizen "[W]hat remains impressive . . . is Naipaul's sense of wonder at the worlds he has discovered. . . . Few writers have traveled as far from their origins as Naipaul has, and done it so willingly and with such single-mindedness, and few have regretted that estrangement quite so much." - "The New York Times "A brilliant work from a man who more than anybody else embodies what it means to be a writer." - "The Observer" "Naipaul writes wonderfully well. He is opinionated, tells gripping stories, loves beyond all else the specificity of details." - "The Independent" "Told in elegantly succinct prose, this deft book offers glimpses of autobiography as well as biography." - "Daily Mail" "From the Hardcover edition."

V. S. Naipaul was born in Trinidad in 1932. He went to England on a scholarship in 1950. After four years at University College, Oxford, he began to write, and since then has followed no other profession. He has published more than twenty books of fiction and non-fiction, including Half a Life, A House for Mr Biswas, A Bend in the River and most recently The Masque of Africa, and a collection of correspondence, Letters Between a Father and Son. In 2001 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.