Magic Seeds

In V. S. Naipaul's Magic Seeds we follow Willie Chandran, a man who has allowed one identity after another to be thrust upon him. In his early forties, after a peripatetic life, he succumbs to the encouragement of his sister - and his own listlessness - and joins an underground movement in India. But years of revolutionary campaigns and then prison convince him that the revolution `had nothing to do with what we were fighting for', and he feels himself further than ever `from his own history'.

When he returns to Britain where, thirty years before, his wanderings began, Willie encounters a country that has turned its back on its past and, like him, has become detached from its own history. He endures the indignities of a culture dissipated by reform and compromise until, in a moment of grotesque revelation - a tour de force of parodic savagery from our most visionary of writers - Willie comes to an understanding that might finally allow him to release his true self.

`A radical further step in one of the great imaginative careers of our time . . . Magic Seeds demands our attention, and nothing more authoritative will be published this year' Philip Hensher, Daily Telegraph