With an introduction from Paul Theroux

V.S. Naipaul first visited India in 1962 at twenty-nine. His most recent visit was in 2015 at eighty-two. The intervening years and visits sparked by an inquisitiveness about a country he had never seen but had been a dream of his since childhood have resulted in three books: India: An Area of Darkness, A Wounded Civilization and A Million Mutinies Now. India is the collection of all three, introduced by fellow traveller and writer Paul Theroux.

An Area of Darkness is V. S. Naipaul?s semi-autobiographical account ? at once painful and hilarious, but always thoughtful and considered ? of his first visit to India, the land of his forebears. From the moment of his inauspicious arrival he experienced a cultural estrangement from the subcontinent. India was land of myths, an area of darkness closing up behind him as he travelled. What emerged was a masterful work of literature that provides a revelation both of India and of himself: a displaced person who paradoxically possesses a stronger sense of place than almost anyone.

India: A Wounded Civilization casts a more analytical eye than before over Indian attitudes, while recapitulating and further probing the feelings aroused in him by this vast, mysterious, and agonized country. A work of fierce candour and precision, it is also a generous description of one man?s complicated relationship with the country of his ancestors.

India: A Million Mutinies Now is the fascinating account of Naipaul's return journey to India and offers a kaleidoscopic, layered travelogue, encompassing a wide collage of religions, castes, and classes at a time when the percolating ideas of freedom threatened to shake loose the old ways. The brilliance of the book lies in Naipaul?s approach to a shifting, changing land from a variety of perspectives. India: A Million Mutinies Now is a truly perceptive work whose insights continue to inform travellers of all generations to India.

To know Indians was to take a delight in people as people; every encounter was an adventure.

Nobel laureate V.S. Naipaul first visited India in 1962 at the age of twenty-nine, hoping to settle the ghosts of a painful ancestral past. That journey was the first in what would become a decades-long project. An Area of Darkness chronicles the author?s initial visit as estrangement gives way to connections and conversations. Prompted by the Emergency of 1975, India: A Wounded Civilization presents an intellectual portrait of a country whose people are no longer so willing to speak or bear witness. India: A Million Mutinies Now captures a panorama of voices and stories fifteen years later, at another moment of national upheaval.

Born of Naipaul?s wish to see for himself the homeland from which he was twice displaced, India emerges as an invaluable account of a nation in times of dramatic change: acutely observant, tender, at once brilliantly composed and vividly clear-sighted.

?Brilliant . . . lyrical, explosive? Observer

?Indispensable for anyone who wants to seriously come to grips with the experience of India? New York Times Book Review