A House for Mr. Biswas

From the Nobel Prize–winning author comes a tragicomic masterpiece of social manners in a postcolonial society, presented here in a stunning hardcover edition. • “Arguably Mr. Naipaul’s finest novel”—The New York Times

His birth ill-omened, his life dominated by fitful, comic struggles and resentful truces with those to whom he is obligated, Mr. Mohun Biswas of Trinidad, toward the end of his forty-sixth year on earth, triumphantly purchases his own house and becomes his own man. Around this supremely simple story, V. S. Naipaul builds one of the few virtually perfect novels in our language, a book that is—in the balance struck between its small incidents and its large, overarching patterns, in the ironic beauty of its prose—at once compelling, mysterious, and classical. It is also one of the few novels in any language that transcend their own genre. A heartrending, dark yet comedic book that established Naipaul as a major literary figure, A House for Mr. Biswas masterfully evokes a man’s quest for autonomy against an emblematic post-colonial canvas.

This edition features an introduction by Karl Miller.

Everyman’s Library pursues the highest production standards, printing on acid-free cream-colored paper, with full-cloth cases with two-color foil stamping, decorative endpapers, silk ribbon markers, European-style half-round spines, and a full-color illustrated jacket. Contemporary Classics include an introduction, a select bibliography, and a chronology of the author’s life and times.