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Title: Half a Life_ A Novel Author: V. S. Naipaul File Type: Mobi Subject:Fiction Description:Amazon.com ReviewHalf a Life finds the veteran Booker and Nobel Prize-winning author V.S. Naipaul on familiar territory, blending autobiography and fiction in an exploration of the half lives of individuals brought up in the English colonies and educated in metropolitan cities. Naipauls protagonist is Willie Somerset Chandran, named after Somerset Maughams encounter with Willies father in the 1930s while traveling to get material for a novel about spirituality. Willie travels to England for his education, where he becomes part of the special, passing bohemian-immigrant life of London of the late 1950s. Willie soon realizes that his colonial background allows him to write short stories for well-meaning white liberals, and he begins to understand that he was free to present himself as he wished and that he could remake himself and his past through his writing. The effect is suffocating rather than liberating, and he marries a vaguely sketched girl or young woman from an African country, who has read his one published book. Willie begins another half life in colonial Mozambique, where he soon tires of the domestic and sexual tedium of plantation life and flees to Germany, mournfully reflecting that I have been hiding for too long.This is classic Naipaul, with its effortless dissection of the damaging personal consequences of post-war decolonization, but its virtue seems its primary vice, as the novel feels like a conflation of several earlier Naipaul books, including strong and the brilliant strong. Consequently, some readers may well find that Half a Life reads more like half a novel. --Jerry Brotton, Amazon.co.ukFrom Publishers WeeklyV.S. Naipaul has often been accused of being ungenerous, especially in his scathing accounts of Third World countries. His slim new novel tacitly poses the question of the worth of generosity without clarity and purpose. Willie Chandran, the central figure here, is born in India in the 1930s, the son of a bitter mixed caste marriage between a Brahmin and a backwards person, or untouchable. Willie learns as a child to despise his fathers ineffectuality and his mothers coarseness. His fathers vague motive in marrying his mother had been to break out of the provincial mold in which he was raised and to live out a life of sacrifice, but too late he discovered that he retained all the prejudices of his caste and despised his wife. Going to London on a scholarship, Willie mixes in immigrant and bohemian circles, and even publishes a book. Naipauls detached rendering of Willies travails shows what happens to a young man who pieces his life together around the great, central dread of not being taken seriously the image of his father as an idler is always in his mind. Willie meets Ana, a woman of mixed African descent, when she writes him a fan letter about his novel. They become lovers. Willie goes back with Ana to her large outback estate in the half and half world of a Portuguese colony like Mozambique, where he remains for 18 years. Naipauls plain narrative is studded with beautifully realized scenes, such as the London party at which a newspaper editor reads his own, self-written obituary, or the night Willie goes to an African brothel with Alvaro, an estate overseer. Although this novel does not aspire to the breadth of Naipauls earlier fiction, it reminds us that his vision is on par with Conrads or Graham Greenes. 40,000 first printing 5-city author tour. 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

Title: Letters to Jackie_ Condolences From a Gr Author: Ellen Fitzpatrick File Type: Mobi Subject:Autobiography Description: It is perhaps the most memorable event of the twentieth century, a moment that left a family and a nation mourning, one that many Americans recall as their first historical memory—the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Within seven weeks of the President's death, Jacqueline Kennedy received more than 800,000 condolence letters. Two years later, the volume of correspondence would exceed 1.5 million letters. For the next forty-six years, the letters would remain essentially untouched. Now historian Ellen Fitzpatrick has selected approximately 250 of these letters for inclusion in *Letters to Jackie*, a remarkable human record that perfectly preserves the heart-wrenching grief and soul searching of the nation in a time of crisis. Capturing the extraordinary eloquence of so-called ordinary Americans across generations, regions, race, political leanings, and religion—in messages written on elegant stationery, scraps of paper, in pencil, type, ink smudged by tears, and in barely legible handwriting—the letters capture what John F. Kennedy meant to the country, and how his death for some divided American history into Before and After. In *Letters to Jackie*, Fitzpatrick allows Americans to write their own history of these tumultuous times. The coffin was very small, as one sixteen-year-old girl observed, to contain so much of so many Americans. In reflecting on their sense of loss, their fears, and their striving, the authors of these letters wrote an American elegy as poignant and as compelling as their shattered and cherished dreams.

Title: Without Prejudice Author: Andrew Rosenheim File Type: Mobi Subject:Fiction:Suspense Description: Robert, recently returned to live in Chicago, is contacted by a childhood friend who has just completed more than twenty years in prison for a horrific crime.Without Prejudiceis a compulsive story of race and the dangers that can lie in the past.