A Turn in the South

A thoughtful and beautifully crafted epilogue to the history of slavery – essential reading for anyone interested in American history.

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A Turn in the South is a reflective journey by V. S. Naipaul in the late 1980s through the American South.

Naipaul writes of his encounters with politicians, rednecks, farmers, writers and ordinary men and women, both black and white, with the insight and originality we expect from one of our best travel writers. Fascinating and poetic, this is a remarkable book on race, culture and country.

‘Naipaul’s writing is supple and fluid, meticulously crafted, adventurous and quick to surprise. And, as usual, there’s the freshness and originality of his way of looking at things’ Sunday Times

‘Naipaul writes as if a modern oracle has chosen to speak through him. It is a tissue of brilliantly recorded hearsay, of intense listening by a man with a remarkable ear’ New York Times Review of Books

‘This is a journey below the Mason–Dixon line into a society riven by too many defeats; the broken cause of the old Confederacy, and the frustrated anger of Southern blacks whose power is circumscribed . . . It is the best thing outside fiction that I have read on the Old South pregnant with the new since W. J. Cash’s The Mind of the South published over fifty years ago’ Sunday Telegraph