In a Free State

V. S. Naipaul's In a Free State came out in 1971 under the Andre Deutsch imprint, and it took the Booker Prize for that year.

The book is built from three stories that sit inside a frame. The narrator opens on a ferry to Egypt and closes the book many years later as a tourist returning to the same country. In between come the title story itself, Tell Me Who to Kill, and One out of Many, about an Indian servant from Bombay who follows his employer to a diplomatic posting in Washington when he can see no future for himself at home.

The three are arranged to work on each other rather than to stand alone, and the theme that runs under them, though never stated outright, has to do with the price exacted by freedom, with the three settings placed so that the reader keeps comparing them. The title story was afterwards issued on its own as a short novel under the same title, and the book as a whole is usually read as one of the works that made Naipaul's name.