R K Narayan Omnibus Volume 1

Nov 24, 2025 11:54 AM

Author:R K Narayan

R. K. Narayan (1906-2001) witnessed nearly a century of change in his native India and captured it in fiction of uncommon warmth and vibrancy. Swami and Friends introduces us to Narayan's beloved fictional town of Malgudi, where ten-year-old Swaminathan's excitement about his country's initial stirrings for independence competes with his ardour for cricket and all other things British. The Bachelor of Arts is a poignant coming-of-age novel about a young man flush with first love, but whose freedom to pursue it is hindered by the fixed ideas of his traditional Hindu family. In The Dark Room, Narayan's portrait of aggrieved domesticity, the docile and obedient Savitri, like many Malgudi women, is torn between submitting to her husband's humiliations and trying to escape them. The title character in The English Teacher, Narayan's most autobiographical novel, searches for meaning when the death of his young wife deprives him of his greatest source of happiness.

Reviews

Narayan wakes in me a spring of gratitude, for he has offered me a second home. Without him I could never have known what it is like to be Indian.

—— Graham Greene

Narayan's humour and compassion come from a deep universal well, with the result that he has transformed his imaginary township of Malgudi into a bubbling parish of the world.

—— The Observer

An idyll as delicious as anything I have met in modern literature for a long time. The atmosphere and texture of happiness, and, above all, its elusiveness, have seldom been so perfectly transcribed.

—— Elizabeth Bowen

'Grand 19th-century fin-de-siècle lusciousness, a seamy 20th-century carnality and a generous pinch of true wit'

—— Sunday Times

Brilliantly paced, sexy and hilarious... An awesome bebut... I can't wait for his second novel

—— Big Issue

Fresh, funny and convincing

—— Mail on Sunday

Angry, moving, urgent

—— Times Literary Supplement

One of my favourite books of the year...This is going to be huge...I loved it

—— Sarah Broadhurst , The Bookseller

An enjoyably bumptious coming of age novel

—— Richard Godwin , Literary Review

Tolerant, funny and real, [the narrator] ducks and dives hedonistically, lazily, gunning out x-ray observations about masculinity, models and "the magic of miscegenation" that would have had Oscar Wilde licking his lips

—— Vogue

'Highly coloured, linguistically inventive...Evans has a powerful and often beguiling imagination'

—— Daily Telegraph

'Sensual and poetic, as well as powerful and uncompromising...A mature, compelling and beautiful first novel'

—— Times Literary Supplement

'The writing is both mature and freshly perceptive, creating not only a warmly funny novel of a Neasden childhood - with its engaging minutiae of flapjacks and icepops, lip gloss and daisy hairclips - but a haunting account of the loss of innocence and mental disintegration.'

—— Maya Jaggi , Guardian

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