No writer has rendered our boundariless, post-colonial world more acutely or prophetically
than V. S. Naipaul, or given its upheavals such a hauntingly human face. A perfect
case in point is this riveting novel, a masterful and stylishly rendered narrative
of emigration, dislocation, and dread, accompanied by four supporting narratives.

In the beginning it is just a car trip through Africa. Two English people-Bobby,
a civil servant with a guilty appetite for African boys, and Linda, a supercilious

compound wife -are driving back to their enclave after a stay in the capital. But in between lies the landscape of an unnamed country whose squalor and
ethnic bloodletting suggest Idi Amin’s Uganda. And the farther Naipaul’s protagonists travel into it, the more they find themselves
crossing the line that separates privileged outsiders from horrified victims. Alongside
this Conradian tour de force are four incisive portraits of men seeking liberation
far from home. By turns funny and terrifying, sorrowful and unsparing, In A Free
State is Naipaul at his best.