In this book, V.S.Naipaul returns to the country which continues to intrigue and inspire him and about which he wrote An Area of Darkness in 1964, a semi-autobiographical account of a year spent in India. Now, twenty-five years later, he goes back to that country, returning to the places he visited years ago and talking to people of all types and at all levels of society. Naipaul started writing in 1954 he has won the John Llewelyn Rhys Memorial Prize, the Somerset Maugham Award, the Hawthornden Prize, the W.H.Smith Award and the Booker Prize, the latter with the novel In a Free State (1971). His most recently published novels are Guerrillas (1975) and A Bend in the River (1979). He is the author of two books about India, An Area of Darkness (1964) and India: A Wounded Civilization (1977); his other well-known works of non-fiction are The Return of Eva Peron with The Killings in Trinidad (1981); Finding the Centre (1984); and A Turn in the South (1989), which is about South America and was shortlisted for the Thomas Cook Travel Book Award in 1990.