*The English Teacher alone has sold over 15,000 copies in Vintage to date
*Four novels in one. Worth £28 if bought separately!
*India's Graham Greene
*Narayan's Centenary is 2006 - press coverage expected
*Narayan magnificently and gently elucidates a different place and life, helping us to understand the world as it is today, with all it's confusion and conflicts...R K Narayan's writing spans the greatest period of change in modern Indian history, from the days of the Raj -
Swami and Friends (1935),
The Bachelor of Arts (1937) and
The English Teacher (1945) - to recent years of political unrest -
The Painter of Signs (1976),
A Tiger for Malgudi (1983), and
Talkative Man (1987). He has published numerous collections of short stories, including
Malgudi Days (1982), and
Under the Banyan Tree (1985), and several works of non-fiction.R. K. Narayan (1906-2001) witnessed nearly a century of change in his native India and captured it in fiction of uncommon warmth and vibrancy.
Swami and Friends introduces us to Narayan's beloved fictional town of Malgudi, where ten-year-old Swaminathan's excitement about his country's initial stirrings for independence competes with his ardour for cricket and all other things British.
The Bachelor of Arts is a poignant coming-of-age novel about a young man flush with first love, but whose freedom to pursue it is hindered by the fixed ideas of his traditional Hindu family. In
The Dark Room, Narayan's portrait of aggrieved domesticity, the docile and obedient Savitri, like many Malgudi women, is torn between submitting to her husband's humiliations and trying to escape them. The title character in
The English Teacher, Narayan's most autobiographical novel, searches for meaning when the death of his young wife deprives him of his greatest source of happiness.Narayan wakes in me a spring of gratitude, for he has offered me a second home. Without him I could never have known what it is like to be Indian.Narayan's humour and compassion come from a deep universal well, with the result that he has transformed his imaginary township of Malgudi into a bubbling parish of the world.An idyll as delicious as anything I have met in modern literature for a long time. The atmosphere and texture of happiness, and, above all, its elusiveness, have seldom been so perfectly transcribed.
