Henry Carter Hull

Chronicles the friendship between writer Paul Theroux and V.S. Naipaul and discusses how the two friends met, how the friends influenced each other's writing, how the friendship lasted more than thirty years, and what caused the two friends to end their friendship.

Nobel laureate V. S. Naipaul's magnificent Magic Seeds continues the story of Willie Chandran, the perennially dissatisfied and self-destructively naive protagonist of his bestselling Half a Life. Having left a wife and a livelihood in Africa, Willie is persuaded to return to his native India to join an underground movement on behalf of its oppressed lower castes. Instead he finds himself in the company of dilettantes and psychopaths, relentlessly...

Willie, the child of a brahmin father and low caste mother, moves to London as an adult where he is able to hide the circumstances of his birth but loses all sense of himself, a fact that becomes clear after he moves to Africa with his mixed-race lover.