---Magic Seeds…offers a gripping glimpse at the sadness of a dream deferred.---

At the outset of V S. Naipaul1s cauterizing new novel, Willie Chandran— the perennially dissatisfied protagonist of Half a Life --- is adrift, iii flight from a failed marriage in Africa and dependent on the largesse of his dictatorial sister. At her urging. he returns to their native India to join an underground struggle on behalf of the lower castes. Instead he finds himself in a company of dilettantes and psychopaths, relentlessly bunted by police and spurned by the people lie means to Liberate.

With an unblinking gaze, NaipauI follows Chandran as he travels from guerrilla encampment to prison cell, from the squalor of India’s villages to the surfeit and moral desolation of 1980s England. Out of his tragicomic search for an ideal and identity he can call his own comes a work of oracular power. Magic Seeds is dazzling in its economy and absolutely merciless in its perceptions.