William Golding, Lord of the Flies

(choirboys lost on desert island revert to satanic evil, humanity's dark side)

Evil and Children (childish innocence an ideal vessel for evil - and sometimes, the children themselves are not so innocent)

Susan Hill, I"m the King of the Castle  (devil-child, jealous of rival, torments the life fronm him)

Henry James, The Turn of the Screw  (neurotic governess tries to protect two innocent charges against half-sensed, wholly evil ghosts)

Stephen King, Carrie  (bullied girl in junior high school uses Devil"s power to take revenge)

John Wyndham, The Midwich Cuckoos  (alien race seeks to capture England by breeding race of hyper-intelligent, soulless children)

Surviving (shipwreck or desertion the door to new adventure)

James Vance Marshall, Walkabout  (English children marooned in Australian outback, taught survival by Aboriginal boy)

Tony Weeks-Pearson, Dodo

Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe  (18th-century shipwrecked sailor builds new life on desert island)

Jonathan Swift, Gulliver"s Travels  (18th-century sailor tries to teach Europena "culture" in fantasy lands he visits)

Jim Crace, Signals of Distress

The Devil (takes many forms and can"t be resisted - or can he?)

Robertson Davies, The Rebel Angels

James Blish, Black Easter  (nuclear scientists enlists Devil"s help in bringing about Armageddon)

Fay Weldon, The Heart of England  (evil forces in Glastonbury countryside interfere with yuppie lives)

John Updike, The Witches of Eastwick  (bored Connecticut housewives play with witchcraft - and raise the Devil)

The Wilderness (surviving the most inhospitable areas of Earth)

Brian Moore, Black Robe  (17th-century Jesuit among 17th-century Indians: bloody, hopeless culture-clash)

C.S. Lewis, Perelandra  (battle for survival - and against unrelenting evil - on the empty planet Venus)

Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness  (African jungle used as metaphor for the evil in humanity)

Patrick White, Voss  (half-crazy explorer leads doomed 19th-century expedition into heart of Australia)

George Orwell, 1984

(repression and oppression in grim totalitarian future)

Bleak Prospects (nightmare scenarios for the future of human society)

Patrick White, A Fringe of Leaves  ("civilised" woman in distress, rehabilitated by contact with aboriginal "primitive" people)

Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

Russell Hoban, Riddley Walker

Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid"s Tale  (grim future: totalitarian, religious oppression, anti-women)

George Turner, The Sea and Summer

Paul Theroux, O-Zone  (efforts to make a viable post-nuclear society in US wilderness)

Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange  (crime and class-war in future Britain)

Inner Hell (the nightmare is inside us)

Will Self, My Idea of Fun

William Golding, Lord of the Flies  (choirboys lost on desert island revert to satanic evil, humanity"s dark side)

Georges Simenon, The Murderer  (criminal psychologically destroyed by guilt)

Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness  (wilderness as a satanic, engulfing force, human evil symbolised)

Fay Weldon, Life and Loves of a She-Devil  (betrayed wife takes macabre, comic revenge)

The Ghastly Past (totalitarian, fundamentalist nightmares from "real" history)

Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter  (religious bigotry in Pilgrim Fathers America)

Willa Cather, Death Comes for the Archbishop  (Catholic missionaries test their faith in 1870s Mexican wilderness)

Graham Greene, Brighton Rock  (crime and redemption in 1930s England)

Alexander Solzhenitsyn, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich  (repression of dissidents in Stalinist labour-camp)

Trinidadian novelist and non-fiction writer (1932-2018)

A Trinidadian Indian who settled in England in his early 20s, Naipaul identifies exclusively with none of these three communities, and has written about all of them. His early novels (culminating in A House for Mr Bis was) were gentle tragi-comedies, but from the late 1960s onwards his books grew darker. He wrote savage non-fiction about the West Indies, India, South America and the Middle East, a mixture of travel and harsh political and social analysis, and his novels dealt with totalitarian oppression and despair. In a Free State is about cultural alienation: its central characters are an Indian servant in Washington, a Trinidadian in racist London and two whites in a fanatical black-power Africa. Guerrillas is set in a Caribbean dictatorship, A Bend in the River in a new' African country, emerging from centuries of colonial exploitation into a corrupt, Orwellian state. For most of the 1980s Naipaul wrote no fiction, but in 1987 he published The Enigma of Arrival, synthesising most of his earlier themes. Its hero, a Trinidadian writer living near Salisbury, reflects on the way his ambitions and his art have changed as he has grown older, on the nature of friend ship, on the passing of old England' and, generally, on the breakdown of the former order of the world. The book's tone is sombre, mellow and rueful; it seems more like autobiography than fiction. It is a unique and moving work.

A HOUSE FOR MR BISWAS  (1961) Mr Bisswas is a free spirit shackled by circumstance. He is a poor Hindu in Trinidad, an educated man among illiterates, a good-natured soul who irritates everyone. He marries into an enormous extended family, the Tulsis, and spends the next 20 years trying to avoid being engulfed by their lifestyle, which he finds vulgar and ridiculous. The conflict - critics see it as an allegory about the absorption of political or ethnic minorities -- is chiefly expressed in comedy. Mr Bis was is desperate to escape from the Tulsis' rambling mansion, thronged with disapproving relatives; his ambition is to live decently with his family in a home of his own. Although he succeeds, the book ends ironically and tragically: his victory, the vindication of all he stands for, turns to ashes even as he savours it.

Naipaul's other novels include The Suffrage of Elvira, Mr Stone and the Knights Companion, The Mystic Masseur, The Mimic Men, Half a Life and Magic Seeds. His non-fiction books include The Middle Passage (on the West Indies and South America), An Area of Darkness and India: a Wounded Civilisation (two studies, a decade apart, of Indian life and politics) and Among Believers: an Islamic Journey and Beyond Belief (two investigations into the Islamic cultures of the Far East). Miguel Street and A Flag on the Island are collections of short stories. Letters Between a Father and a Son is the correspondence between Naipaul, studying at Oxford, and his father, working as a journalist in Trinidad and nursing his own literary ambitions. The correspondence is brought to a moving conclusion by the elder Naipaul’s sudden death at the age of only 47.

READ ON

The Mystic Masseur

A Way in the World

To the social comedies : Timothy Mo, Sour-Sweet Shiva Naipaul, Fireflies (Shiva is V.S.'s brother) R.K. Narayan, Mr Sampath/The Printer of Malgudi Amos Tutuola, The Palm-wine Drinkard Rohinton Mistry, Family Matters

To Naipaul's political novels : Joseph Conrad, Nostromo Christopher Hope, Black Swan

To The Enigma of Arrival : P.H. Newby, Leaning in the Wind

Polish/British novelist (1857-1924)

Born in Poland, Conrad ran away to sea at 17 and ended up a captain in the merchant navy and a naturalised British subject. He retired from the sea at 37 and spent the rest of his life as a writer. There was at the time (1890s--1910s) a strong tradition of sea-stories, using the dangers and tensions of long voyages and the wonders of the worlds sailors visited as metaphors for human life. Most of this writing was straightforward adventure, with little subtlety; Conrad used its conventions for deeper literary ends. He was interested in driven' individuals, people whose psychology or circumstances force them to extreme behaviour, and the sea-story form exactly suited this idea. His books often begin as yarns', set in exotic locations and among the mixed (and mixed-up) human types who crew ocean-going ships. But before long psychology takes over, and the plot loses its straightforwardness and becomes an exploration of compulsion, obsession and neurosis.

HEART OF DARKNESS  (1902) This 120-page story begins as a yarn': Marlow, a sea-captain, tells of a journey he once made up the Congo river to bring down a stranded steamer. He became fascinated by stories of an ivory-merchant, a white man called Kurtz who lived deep in the jungle and was said to have supernatural powers. Marlow set out to find Kurtz, and the journey took him deeper and deeper into the heart not only of the Dark Continent', but into the darkness of the human soul. (Francis Ford Coppola's 1970s film Apocalypse Now updated this story to the Vietnam War, making points about US colonialism as savage as Conrad's denunciation of the ivory-trade).

Conrad's major novels are Lord Jim, The Nigger of the Narcissus, Nostromo, The Secret Agent and Under Western Eyes. His short-story collections (an excellent introduction to his work) are Tales of Unrest, Youth, Typhoon, A Set of Six, Twixt Land and Sea, Within the Tides and Tales of Hearsay.

READ ON

Typhoon (which deals with corruption and exploitation of a different kind, this time using as its metaphor a passenger steamer caught in a typhoon in the China Sea);

The Secret Agent (about the conflict between innocence and corruption among a group of terrorists in 1900s London)

J.G. Ballard, The Drowned World is an sf novel of Conradian intensity. Lionel Davidson, Making Good Again Robert Edric, The Book of the Heathen a modern novelist examines Conradian themes in the Conradian setting of 1890s Belgian Congo). Graham Greene, The Comedians John Kruse, The Hour of the Lily Herman Melville, Billy Budd, Foretopman Paul Theroux, The Mosquito Coast B. Traven, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre

R.F.A. Sully-Prudhomme French poet and first Nobel Laureate (1901)

Jose Echegaray y Eizaguirre Spanish dramatist (1904)

Henrik Pontoppidan Danish novelist (1917)

Carl Friedrich Georg Spitteler Swiss poet (1919)

Wladyslaw Stanislaw Reymont Polish novelist (1924)

Erik Axel Karlfeldt Swedish poet (1931)

Frans Eemil Sillanpää Finnish novelist (1939)

Par Fabian Lagerkvist Swedish novelist and poet (1951)

Salvatore Quasimodo Italian poet (1959)

Yasunari Kawabata Japanese novelist (1968)