A Malgudi Omnibus

The novelist I most admire in the English language... 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

The hardest of all things for a novelist to communicate is the extraordinary ordinariness of human happiness. Jane Austen, Soskei, Chekhov; a few bring it off. Narayan is one of them

Spectator

No writer is more deceptively casual, or less fussed about the Eternal Verities, or more unerring in arriving by delightful detours at his destination - which is seldom a terminus because life keeps bobbing on

Guardian

R K 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.

Alexander McCall Smith, Guardian

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

John Updike

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

Every literature student should have space on her shelf for the complete works of R K Narayan. Or at least for a Malgudi omnibus, the fictional town in which he set many of his novels

Monica Ali, Guardian