The first major biography of V.S. Naipaul, the controversial and enigmatic Nobel laureate: a stunning writer whose only stated ambition was greatness, in pursuit of which goal nothing else was sacred.

Beginning in rich detail in Trinidad, where Naipaul was born into an Indian family, Patrick French skillfully examines Naipaul' s life within a displaced community and his fierce ambition at school. He describes how, on scholarship at Oxford, homesickness and depression struck with great force; the ways in which Naipaul's first wife helped him to cope and their otherwise fraught marriage; and Naipaul's struggles throughout subsequent uncertainties in England, including his twenty-five-year-long affair.

Naipaul's extraordinary gift--producing, uniquely, masterpieces of both fiction and nonfiction--is most of all born of a forceful, visionary impulse, whose roots French traces with a sympathetic brilliance and devastating insight.

A monumental biography of the Indian subcontinent from the award-winning author of The World Is What It Is: The Authorized Biography of V. S. Naipaul.

Second only to China in the magnitude of its economic miracle and second to none in its potential to shape the new century, India is fast undergoing one of the most momentous transformations the world has ever seen. In this dazzlingly panoramic book, Patrick French chronicles that epic change, telling human stories to explain a larger national narrative. With a familiarity and insight few Westerners could approach, he provides a vital corrective to the many outdated notions about a uniquely dynamic and consequential nation.

At different times in its history Tibet has been renowned for pacifism and martial prowess, enlightenment and cruelty.

The Dalai Lama may be the only religious leader who can inspire the devotion of agnostics. Patrick French has been fascinated by Tibet since he was a teenager. He has read its history, agitated for its freedom, and risked arrest to travel through its remote interior. His love and knowledge inform every page of this learned, literate, and impassioned book.

Talking with nomads and Buddhist nuns, exiles and collaborators, French portrays a nation demoralized by a half-century of Chinese occupation and forced to depend on the patronage of Western dilettantes. He demolishes many of the myths accruing to Tibet-including those centering around the radiant figure of the Dalai Lama. Combining the best of history, travel writing, and memoir, Tibet, Tibet is a work of extraordinary power and insight.

The work of the French literary review, intellectual grouping and publishing team Tel Quel had a profound impact on the formation of literary and cultural debate in the 1960s and 70s. Its legacy has had enormous influence on the parameters of such debate today. From its beginning in 1960 to its closure in 1982, it published some of the earliest work of Jacques Derrida, Julia Kristeva, Michel Foucault and Roland Barthes. It was also associated with some of the key ideas of the French avant-garde, publishing key articles by Georges Bataille and Antonin Artaud.
The Tel Quel Reader presents for the first time in English the key essays written by the Tel Quel group. Essays by Julia Kristeva, one of the review's editor's Michel Foucault, and a fascinating interview with Roland Barthes are here made available for the first time in English. It provides a unique insight into the post-structuralist movement and presents some of the pioneering essays on literature and culture, film, semiotics and psychoanalysis.
Assembling key essays from over a twenty-year period, The Tel Quel Reader is an indispensible resource for students of literature, cultural and visual studies, philosophy and French studies.

The unknown is intimidating, especially when it comes to life after death. To Michael is was not, but more of a challenge, considering his circumstances. Life was great before the accident, Michael enjoyed spending time with his Father, Mother, Brother Peter, Peters wife Rebecca, and David, Peters son. After that horrific day everything changed. The family was shattered and what was done could not be changed. Peter could not carry on, he found the best way was to escape life altogether, and he chose suicide. Depending on your beliefs, in some religions your soul is sent to hell to burn and suffer for the rest of eternity, but again, who actually knows. Michael's dreams of his brothers tormented soul burning in the lake of fire were getting worse, they became more real as time went on. The nightmares became so intense, that he could not ignore the signs, something was happening, and something had to be done. Through conversations with Wiley, Michael's Jamaican drug dealer, Michael discovered that there could be a way to get his soul into the afterlife. The hardest part will be to pass through the keeper of souls. According to some, a soul will not pass through if it is pure. So the descent into Michael's redemption begins. He knows his time is limited, so his actions needed to be quick if he is to save is brothers soul from eternal damnation.

From the author of India: A Portrait, Patrick French's Tibet, Tibet: A Personal History of a Lost Land has been acclaimed as the book that showed the real Tibet for the first time.

Tibet has long fascinated the West, but what really lies beyond our romantic image of a Buddhist mountain kingdom of peace and spirituality?

Travelling through the country, French meets warrior monks, nomads and a nun secretly fighting Chinese communist rule, but also young Tibetans with a more pragmatic attitude to their situation. Interweaving these encounters with little-known stories of war and turmoil from Tibet's past, he reveals a more nuanced, fascinating and surprising picture of this complex place than any other book has done.

'Mixes a compelling subject, magnificent prose and deep understanding'
The Times

'Inspired and heartfelt ... shows that Tibet was never the peace-loving paradise so many generations of well-wishers have longed for it to be'
Pico Iyer, Los Angeles Times

'Tibet, Tibet, so good they named it twice ... French is a writer of generous talents'
Sunday Times

'French has produced something very different from what he calls Tibetophile literature, something greatly superior in its honesty and lack of false sentiment'
Spectator

'A gripping mix of history, travel writing and personal memoir ... vividly told'
Observer

Patrick French is the author of Younghusband: The Last Great Imperial Adventurer, which won the Somerset Maugham Award and the Royal Society of Literature W. H. Heinemann Prize, Liberty or Death: India's Journey to Independence and Division, which won the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award, Tibet, Tibet: A Personal History of a Lost Land and, most recently, The World Is What It Is: The Authorized Biography of V.S. Naipaul, which was shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize and won the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Hawthornden Prize.