'The Nigger of the Narcissus' recounts life on a trading ship as Conrad must have experienced it in the British Merchant Navy. Also contains 'The Secret Sharer', a very fine short story.

Enjoyable and colourful novel in which a romantic youth disgraces himself at sea, then "goes native" in the East Indies.

The title-piece is a powerful description of nature's destructive force and is rich in symbolism.

More exploitation and nihilism, but this time is a tightly-plotted and suspensful spy novel set among London's revolutionaries.

Naipaul's first novel and first collection of short stories. Both are delightfully funny and pleasurable to read, although Miguel Street in particular has darker undertones.

Contains the early novels 'The Suffrage of Elvira' and 'Mr Stone and the Knight's Companion' plus a book of short stories: 'A Flag on the Island'.

Booker Prize winning collection of novellas. Bleak and depersonalised, but very powerful.

The narrator stuggles to establish himself, like Mr Biswas but in a more hostile climate: in Mobuto's Congo, in a town "at the bend of the great river". One of the greatest novels of recent times.

Naipaul has claimed that writing Mr Biswas had exhausted him as a writer. His travel in the decolonised third world transformed his writing. This, his first travel book, was commissioned by the BBC.

Naipaul's take on Islamic civilisation was and is highly controversial. He visited Iran, Pakistan, Malaysia and Indonesia in the wake of the Iranian Revolution.

Naipaul's literary essays, including 'Conrad's Darkness and Mine'. Not a particularly generous critic of other writers (see reviews of his recent 'A Writer's People'), but good on his own writing.