The English Teacher

Narayan wakes in me a spring of gratitude, for he has offered me a second home. Without him I could never have known what it is like to be Indian * Graham Greene *
Narayan’s humour and compassion come from a deep universal well, with the result that he has transformed his imaginary township of Malgudi into a bubbling parish of the world * Observer *
In his humour and compassion, Narayan comes close to being a twentieth-century Indian Chekhov * Sunday Telegraph *
RK Narayan’s Malgudi novels are humorous gems and it is a great pity that they are not better known. He wrote beautifully and with great compassion, something regrettably lacking in some humorous writing – Alexander McCall Smith
An idyll as delicious as anything I have met in modern literature for a long time. The atmosphere and texture of happiness, and, above all, its elusiveness, have seldom been so perfectly transcribed. – Elizabeth Bowen
Few writers since Dickens can match the effect of the colourful teeming that Narayan’s fictional city of Malgudi conveys – John Updike
Revisiting it at the age of 40 I find in it so many beautiful and moving things… In Narayan’s hands even the torture of the mind is so untortured; the conversations and descriptions so unadorned as to give the impression of words flowing like blood or air through one’s body – Ardashir Vakil * Guardian *

R K Narayan’s writing spans the greatest period of change in modern Indian history, from the days of the Raj - Swami and Friends (1935), The Bachelor of Arts (1937) and The English Teacher (1945) - to recent years of political unrest - The Painter of Signs (1976), A Tiger for Malgudi (1983), and Talkative Man (1987). He has published numerous collections of short stories, including Malgudi Days (1982), and Under the Banyan Tree (1985), and several works of non-fiction.

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