A Turn in the South

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