A Bend in the River

Salim, a young man from a community of Indian Muslim traders on the East African coast, buys a small shop in a town at a bend in a great river, deep in the interior of a newly independent African country. The town is rebuilding from the ruin of colonial departure, and Salim watches it cycle through fragile prosperity, rebellion, and the rise of a strongman called the Big Man, whose cult of personality reshapes everything. Naipaul charts the disillusion of a man who belongs nowhere, neither to the Africa around him nor to the past he left, as the country slides toward a violence he cannot escape.