Malgudi Omnibus

Discover one of India's most valued and adored twentieth-century novelists, including his novel Swami and Friends.Here are three of R. K. Narayan's most famous and best loved novels: Swami and Friends, The Bachelor of Arts and The English Teacher. All set in the imaginary Indian town of Malgudi, these irresistible works provide the perfect introduction to a universal world of humour, sadness, wisdom and joy. **Featuring one of the BBC’s 100 Novels That Shaped Our World**

Every literature student should have space on her shelf for the complete works of R K Narayan. Or at least for a Malgudi omnibus, the fictional town in which he set many of his novels, 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 hardest of all things for a novelist to communicate is the extraordinary ordinariness of human happiness. Jane Austen, Soskei, Chekhov; a few bring it off. Narayan is one of them, No writer is more deceptively casual, or less fussed about the Eternal Verities, or more unerring in arriving by delightful detours at his destination - which is seldom a terminus because life keeps bobbing on, R K Narayan’s Malgudi novels are humorous gems and it is a great pity that they are not better known. He wrote beautifully and with great compassion.

R K Narayan's writing spans the greatest period of change in modern Indian history, from the days of the Raj - Swami and Friends (1935), The Bachelor of Arts (1937) and The English Teacher (1945) - to recent years of political unrest - The Painter of Signs (1976), A Tiger for Malgudi (1983), and Talkative Man (1987). He has published numerous collections of short stories, including Malgudi Days (1982), and Under the Banyan Tree (1985), and several works of non-fiction.