Book summary

V. S. Naipaul's powerful work of disenfranchisement, postcolonial immorality, and human cruelty won the Booker Prize in 1971. The book consists of three thematically linked short stories, plus a prologue and epilogue of travel writing by the narrator. The book's titular tale, "In A Free State," involves an unpleasant homosexual British official and his wife traveling in a fictional African country caught up in a power struggle between the King and the President. In "One Out of Many," an Indian servant finds himself enforcing the vicious law of his British masters, and when he tries to better his situation, he becomes trapped financially, legally, and sexually. "Tell Me Who To Kill," is equally bleak in its appraisal of a man's ability to become free within the shackles and humiliations of society: a West Indian immigrant in London works furiously to run a business and support his brother's education. In the end, his business in shambles, and betrayed by his brother, he asks only "Tell me who to kill." With his razor sharp prose, and unforgiving eye, Naipaul plumbs the depths of society's darkest questions.

Media reviews

"Naipaul's grouping...is not a collection of 'occasional' pieces but an entity; and I approach it as contiguous with a personal vision that blazed forth in his magnificent novel 'A House for Mr. Biswas'....This book is not his best work; but it is part of achievement that I believe in the end will show him to have been a great writer."