The English Teacher - Softcover

"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)

'The novelist I most admire in the English language' Graham Greene

Krishna, an English teacher in the town of Malgudi, nagged by the feeling he's doing the wrong work, is nonetheless delighted by his domestic life, where his wife and young daughter wait for him outside the house every afternoon. Devastated by the death of his wife, Krishna comes to realise what he really wants to do, and makes a decision that will change his life forever.

'Few writers since Dickens can match the effect of the colourful teeming that Narayan's fictional city of Malgudi conveys' John Updike

See also: A Malgudi Omnibus