In Miguel Street, Naipaul takes us into a derelict corner of Trinidad's Port of Spain where we meet Popo, the carpenter, who neglects his livelihood to build 'the thing without a name'; Man-man, who goes from running for public office to staging his own crucifixion; and the lovely Mrs Hereira, in thrall to her monstrous husband. The stories from A Flag on the Island, meanwhile, roam from a Chinese bakery in Trinidad u whose black proprietor faces bankruptcy until he takes a Chinese name u to a rooming house in London, where the genteel landlady plays a nasty Darwinian game with her pet parakeets. In 'One Out of Many' the Indian servant Santosh is uprooted from Bombay and forced to adapt to an entirely different life and culture in Washington, D.C. , while in 'Tell Me Who to Kill' an unnamed West Indian proudly comes to London to support his brother's studies and finds himself turned into a victim in more ways than one. No writer has rendered our post-colonial world more acutely or prophetically than V.S. Naipaul, or given its upheavals such a hauntingly human face. 'Naipaul is Conrad's heir as the annalist of the destinies of empires in the moral sense: what they do to human beings. His authority as a narrator is grounded in his memory of what others have forgotten, the history of the vanquisheda In a vigilant style, which has been deservedly admired, he transforms rage into precision and allows events to speak with their own inherent irony.' u Swedish Academy, Nobel citation
