Shelfology Book Pairing

A Novel

by Yann Martel

Sixteen-year-old Pi Patel is stranded in a lifeboat on the Pacific Ocean with only a 450-pound Bengal tiger for company, and must learn to survive both tiger and ocean.

A Novel

by V. S. Naipaul

"A marvellous prose epic that matches the best nineteenth-century novels" Newsweek "A work of great comic power qualified with firm and unsentimental compassion." Anthony Burgess A House for Mr Biswas is V.S. Naipaul's unforgettable third novel. Born the "wrong way" and thrust into a world that greeted him with little more than a bad omen, Mohun Biswas has spent his 46 years of life striving for independence. But his determined efforts have met only with calamity. Shuttled from one residence to another after the drowning of his father, Mr Biswas yearns for a place he can call home. He marries into the domineering Tulsi family, on whom he becomes indignantly dependent, but rebels and takes on a succession of occupations in an arduous struggle to weaken their hold over him and purchase a house of his own. Heartrending and darkly comic, A House for Mr Biswas masterfully evokes a man's quest for autonomy against the backdrop of post-colonial Trinidad.