"There are writersTolstoy and Henry James to name twowhom we hold in awe, writersTurgenev and Chekhovfor whom we feel a personal affection, other writers whom we respectConrad for examplebut who hold us at a long arm's length with their 'courtly foreign grace.' Narayan (whom I don't hesitate to name in such a context) more than any of them 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 Offering rare insight into the complexities of Indian middle-class society, R. K. Narayan traces life in the fictional town of Malgudi.The Dark Roomis a searching look at a difficult marriage and a woman who eventually rebels against the demands of being a good and obedient wife. InMr. Sampath,a newspaper man tries to keep his paper afloat in the face of social and economic changes sweeping India. Narayan writes of youth and young adulthood in the semiautobiographicalSwami and FriendsandThe Bachelor of Arts.Although the ordinary tensions of maturing are heightened by the particular circumstances of pre-partition India, Narayan provides a universal vision of childhood, early love and grief. "The experience of reading one of his novels is . . . comparable to one's first reaction to the great Russian novels: the fresh realization of the common humanity of all peoples, underlain by a simultaneous sense of strangenesslike one's own reflection seen in a green twilight."Margaret Parton,New York Herald Tribune