The Chip-Chip Gatherers
By (Author) Shiva Naipaul
Penguin Books Ltd
Penguin Classics
19th September 2012
United Kingdom
Paperback
336
Width 129mm, Height 198mm, Spine 19mm
248g
Naipaul's moving and Whitbread Award-winning family saga set in Trinidad At the centre of a crowded, ramshackle community in Trinidad stands Egbert Ramsaran, the proud owner of the Ramsaran Transport Company. Shiva Naipaul's enthralling and colourful second novel tells the story of the lives of the people within this community- Egbert's son, Wilbert; Vishnu, the grocer; Julian, hoping to become a doctor; and above all, the beautiful Sushila.
Shiva Naipaul was born in Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago, in 1945, the younger brother of the novelist V. S. Naipaul. Having won a scholarship to study Chinese at University College, Oxford, he emigrated to England, where he met and later married Jenny Stuart. He wrote two novels - Fireflies (1970) and The Chip-Chip Gatherers (1973) - before turning to non-fiction. His book North of South, an account of his travels in Africa, is published in Penguin Modern Classics. Later works include the novel A Hot Country, as well as a collection of fiction and non-fiction, Beyond the Dragon's Mouth. Naipaul died from a heart attack in August 1985, aged forty. Amit Chaudhuri was born in Calcutta in 1962, and grew up in Bombay. He read English at University College, London and completed his doctorate on D.H. Lawrence at Balliol College, Oxford. He has written five novels- A Strange and Sublime Address; Afternoon Raag; Freedom Song; A New World; and The Immortals, which was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best Book. He is now Professor in Contemporary Literature at the University of East Anglia and was made Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2009.