Book review
A master of observation, subtlety and gentle wit, R.K. Narayan has few rivals when it comes to bringing alive people and places. Most of his timeless novels are set in the fictional town of Malgudi, located somewhere in South India, a town as real to his readers as any they will find on the map. This volume contains three quintessential Malgudi novels—Swami and Friends, The Bachelor of Arts and The Vendor of Sweets.

Swami and Friends, published in 1935, was the first novel Narayan wrote. Described by Graham Greene as ‘a novel in ten thousand’, it recounts the adventures of ten-year-old Swaminathan and his friends Rajam and Mani. The Bachelor of Arts, the second novel in the collection, is a brilliantly realized account of the workings of a young man’s mind. It is the story of Chandran, in his final year at college, who falls hopelessly in love and is forced to exile himself from the familiar surroundings of Malgudi until he is able to arrive at a satisfactory resolution to his problems. The Vendor of Sweets showcases a classic cross-generational battle, between Jagan, a widower of firm Ghandian principles, and his ‘modern’ son Mali, who returns to Malgudi with a half-American wife and a grand plan for selling story-writing machines.

The third in the series of Penguin India’s collectors’ editions of the Malgudi novels, The Magic of Malgudi, with an introduction by S. Krishnan, will delight first-time readers as well as devoted Narayan fans.

‘Narayan has a faultless ear for the intricate eccentricities of Indian English.’
— The Times


About the author R.K. Narayan (1906-2001) was born in Madras and educated there and at Maharajah’s College, Mysore. His first novel was Swami and Friends (1935). In 1980 R.K. Narayan was awarded the A.C. Benson medal by the Royal Society of Literature and was made Honorary Member of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. In 1989 he was made member of the Rajya Sabha. In 2000 the Padma Vibhushan was conferred on him. The novelist places himself firmly among the ordinary people, breaking down the boundaries between the real life outside his fiction and the life within the fiction. Narayan's small town and its characters have a universal appeal. 'The grand old man of Indo-Anglian writing, and one of the greatest English language writers of the last century... There are no last words on such maestros.' —The Tribune