Publisher's Synopsis
"R.K. Narayan . . . has been compared to Gogol in England, where he has acquired a well-deserved reputation. The comparison is apt, for Narayan, an Indian, is a writer of Gogol's stature, with the same gift for creating a provincial atmosphere in a time of change. . . . One is convincingly involved in this alien world without ever being aware of the technical devices Narayan so brilliantly employs."-Anthony West, The New Yorker
"The experience of reading one of his novels is . . . comparable to one's first reaction to the great Russian novels: the fresh realization of the common humanity of all peoples, underlain by a simultaneous sense of strangeness-like one's own reflection seen in a green twilight."-Margaret Parton, New Herald Tribune Book Review
"The hardest of all things for a novelist to communicate is the extraordinary ordinariness of most human happiness. . . . Jane Austen, Soseki, Chekhov: a few bring it off. Narayan is one of them."-Francis King, Spectator
"The novels of R.K. Narayan are the best I have read in any language for a long time."-Amit Roy, Daily Telegraph
"The experience of reading one of his novels is . . . comparable to one's first reaction to the great Russian novels: the fresh realization of the common humanity of all peoples, underlain by a simultaneous sense of strangeness-like one's own reflection seen in a green twilight."-Margaret Parton, New Herald Tribune Book Review
"The hardest of all things for a novelist to communicate is the extraordinary ordinariness of most human happiness. . . . Jane Austen, Soseki, Chekhov: a few bring it off. Narayan is one of them."-Francis King, Spectator
"The novels of R.K. Narayan are the best I have read in any language for a long time."-Amit Roy, Daily Telegraph
