About Book
Set on a troubled Caribbean island - where Asians, Africans, Americans and former British colonials co-exist in a state of suppressed hysteria - "Guerrillas" is a novel of colonialism and revolution. A white man arrives with his mistress, an English woman influenced by fantasies of native power and sexuality, unaware of the consequences of her actions. Together with a leader of the "revolution", they act out a gripping drama of death, sexual violence, and spiritual impotence. "Guerrillas" depicts a convulsion in public life, and ends in private violence. Place and people are evoked with an intensity unrivalled elsewhere. The novel comes with extraordinary force from the centre of a profound moral awareness of the world's plight. 'Impeccable prose, precise, austere, modulating always from place to people to dialogue with a fastidious reserve. "Guerrillas" seems to me Naipaul's Heart of Darkness: a brilliant artist's anatomy of emptiness, and of despair' - "Observer".
About Author
V.S. Naipaul was born in Trinidad in 1932. He is the author of thirteen works of fiction, including A House for Mr Biswas, The Mystic Masseur and The Enigma of Arrival, and ten books of non-fiction including An Area of Darkness and Among the Believers. He has won the Booker Prize, the John Llewelyn Rhys Memorial Prize, the Hawthornden Prize, the WH Smith award and in 1993 was awarded the first David Cohen British Literature Award. His new novel, Half A Life, was published in September 2001. Shortly afterwards he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. He lives in Wiltshire.