Reading Groups

A House for Mr. Biswas with Kannan Mahadevan

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8 sessions Thursdays, 6:00 pm EDT - 7:30 pm EDT November 6, 2025 to January 15, 2026

Online via Zoom

The ‘With Books’ option includes the titles required for this group at an additional 10% discount from our Bookstore.

Meeting Dates:
11/6, 11/13, 11/20, 12/4, 12/11, 12/18, 1/8, 1/15
Online via Zoom

V. S. Naipaul wrote and rewrote his father’s story, and the story of his own childhood and self-exile from Trinidad, over and over during the course of his career. Depending on where he was as a writer, he could paint the material in different colors, comic or desperate, but never is it given such leisurely breadth as in his early epic, A House for Mr. Biswas, one man’s lifelong quest for a permanent home.

We’ll study the novel as the fruition of Naipaul’s early prose style, with its simple sentences and accumulation of physical detail. We’ll compare it to the author’s other versions of home, from his earliest stories to his late travel writing and nonfiction. Finally, we’ll look at the novel’s reception over the years, as a ‘postcolonial masterpiece’ forever resisting that tagline

What to read in advance of the first meeting: Please read the prologue through “Before the Tulsis” (pgs. 5-76) from A House for Mr. Biswas by V. S. Naipaul.

What to expect from this reading group: The course will feature limited lectures and prioritize your response to the text in the form of a mutual conversation. Supplementary readings, from other points in Naipaul’s career and from his Caribbean contemporaries, will be provided.

Reading List:

A House for Mr. Biswas by V. S. Naipaul

Please note: All virtual classes are recorded. Please click here for information about our recording policy.

Led by

Kannan Mahadevan

Kannan Mahadevan

Kannan Mahadevan is a graduate of the University of Chicago and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where he earned an MFA in Fiction. He has taught creative writing workshops at Drew University and the Berlin Writers’ Workshop, and led reading groups on Don Quixote and The Magic Mountain for The Center for Fiction.

About this series

Reading Groups

Whether you’re looking to catch up on great novels or you’re interested in exploring a new writer or literary period, our reading groups offer high-level literary discussion led by experts in the field.

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