V.S. Naipaul Reading Order

121 books (2002–2025)

Start with San Francisco Noir, the first of 121 books in the Akashic Noir series.

#	Title
1	San Francisco Noir 2002Buy 🇺🇸
2	Bronx Noir 2003Buy 🇺🇸
3	Seattle Noir 2003Buy 🇺🇸
4	Brooklyn Noir 2004Buy 🇺🇸
5	Hasidic Noir 2004Buy 🇺🇸
6	Brooklyn Noir 2 2005Buy 🇺🇸
7	Chicago Noir 2005Buy 🇺🇸
8	Dublin Noir 2005Buy 🇺🇸
9	Baltimore Noir 2006Buy 🇺🇸
10	D.C. Noir 2006Buy 🇺🇸
11	London Noir 2006Buy 🇺🇸
12	Manhattan Noir 2006Buy 🇺🇸
13	Miami Noir 2006Buy 🇺🇸
14	Twin Cities Noir 2006Buy 🇺🇸
15	Detroit Noir 2007Buy 🇺🇸
16	Havana Noir 2007Buy 🇺🇸
17	Los Angeles Noir 2007Buy 🇺🇸
18	New Orleans Noir 2007Buy 🇺🇸
19	Wall Street Noir 2007Buy 🇺🇸
20	Brooklyn Noir 3: Nothing But the Truth 2008Buy 🇺🇸
21	D.C. Noir 2 2008Buy 🇺🇸
22	Istanbul Noir 2008Buy 🇺🇸
23	Las Vegas Noir 2008Buy 🇺🇸
24	Manhattan Noir 2 2008Buy 🇺🇸
25	Paris Noir 2008Buy 🇺🇸
26	Queens Noir 2008Buy 🇺🇸
27	Toronto Noir 2008Buy 🇺🇸
28	Trinidad Noir 2008Buy 🇺🇸
29	Boston Noir 2009Buy 🇺🇸
30	Delhi Noir 2009Buy 🇺🇸
31	Phoenix Noir 2009Buy 🇺🇸
32	Portland Noir 2009Buy 🇺🇸
33	Rome Noir 2009Buy 🇺🇸
34	San Francisco Noir 2 2009Buy 🇺🇸
35	Copenhagen Noir 2010Buy 🇺🇸
36	Haiti Noir 2010Buy 🇺🇸
37	Indian Country Noir 2010Buy 🇺🇸
38	Lone Star Noir 2010Buy 🇺🇸
39	Los Angeles Noir 2 2010Buy 🇺🇸
40	Mexico City Noir 2010Buy 🇺🇸
41	Moscow Noir 2010Buy 🇺🇸
42	Orange County Noir 2010Buy 🇺🇸
43	Philadelphia Noir 2010Buy 🇺🇸
44	Richmond Noir 2010Buy 🇺🇸
45	Barcelona Noir 2011Buy 🇺🇸
46	Cape Cod Noir 2011Buy 🇺🇸
47	New Jersey Noir 2011Buy 🇺🇸
48	Pittsburgh Noir 2011Buy 🇺🇸
49	San Diego Noir 2011Buy 🇺🇸
50	Boston Noir 2 2012Buy 🇺🇸
51	Kansas City Noir 2012Buy 🇺🇸
52	Kingston Noir 2012Buy 🇺🇸
53	Long Island Noir 2012Buy 🇺🇸
54	Mumbai Noir 2012Buy 🇺🇸
55	St. Petersburg Noir 2012Buy 🇺🇸
56	Staten Island Noir 2012Buy 🇺🇸
57	Venice Noir 2012Buy 🇺🇸
58	Buffalo Noir 2013Buy 🇺🇸
59	Dallas Noir 2013Buy 🇺🇸
60	Haiti Noir 2 2013Buy 🇺🇸
61	Manila Noir 2013Buy 🇺🇸
62	USA Noir 2013Buy 🇺🇸
63	Belfast Noir 2014Buy 🇺🇸
64	Helsinki Noir 2014Buy 🇺🇸
65	Prison Noir 2014Buy 🇺🇸
66	Rio Noir 2014Buy 🇺🇸
67	Singapore Noir 2014Buy 🇺🇸
68	Tehran Noir 2014Buy 🇺🇸
69	Tel Aviv Noir 2014Buy 🇺🇸
70	Beirut Noir 2015Buy 🇺🇸
71	Chicago Noir: The Classics 2015Buy 🇺🇸
72	Marseille Noir 2015Buy 🇺🇸
73	Memphis Noir 2015Buy 🇺🇸
74	Providence Noir 2015Buy 🇺🇸
75	Zagreb Noir 2015Buy 🇺🇸
76	Brussels Noir 2016Buy 🇺🇸
77	Mississippi Noir 2016Buy 🇺🇸
78	New Orleans Noir: The Classics 2016Buy 🇺🇸
79	Prague Noir 2016Buy 🇺🇸
80	San Juan Noir 2016Buy 🇺🇸
81	St. Louis Noir 2016Buy 🇺🇸
82	Stockholm Noir 2016Buy 🇺🇸
83	Atlanta Noir 2017Buy 🇺🇸
84	Buenos Aires Noir 2017Buy 🇺🇸
85	Montana Noir 2017Buy 🇺🇸
86	Montreal Noir 2017Buy 🇺🇸
87	New Haven Noir 2017Buy 🇺🇸
88	Oakland Noir 2017Buy 🇺🇸
89	Trinidad Noir: The Classics 2017Buy 🇺🇸
90	Baghdad Noir 2018Buy 🇺🇸
91	Berlin Noir 2018Buy 🇺🇸
92	Hong Kong Noir 2018Buy 🇺🇸
93	Lagos Noir 2018Buy 🇺🇸
94	Marrakech Noir 2018Buy 🇺🇸
95	Santa Cruz Noir 2018Buy 🇺🇸
96	Sydney Noir 2018Buy 🇺🇸
97	São Paulo Noir 2018Buy 🇺🇸
98	Vancouver Noir 2018Buy 🇺🇸
99	Amsterdam Noir 2019Buy 🇺🇸
100	Houston Noir 2019Buy 🇺🇸
101	Milwaukee Noir 2019Buy 🇺🇸
102	Accra Noir 2020Buy 🇺🇸
103	Addis Ababa Noir 2020Buy 🇺🇸
104	Alabama Noir 2020Buy 🇺🇸
105	Belgrade Noir 2020Buy 🇺🇸
106	Berkeley Noir 2020Buy 🇺🇸
107	Columbus Noir 2020Buy 🇺🇸
108	Miami Noir: The Classics 2020Buy 🇺🇸
109	Nairobi Noir 2020Buy 🇺🇸
110	Santa Fe Noir 2020Buy 🇺🇸
111	Tampa Bay Noir 2020Buy 🇺🇸
112	Palm Springs Noir 2021Buy 🇺🇸
113	Denver Noir 2022Buy 🇺🇸
114	Paris Noir: The Suburbs 2022Buy 🇺🇸
115	South Central Noir 2022Buy 🇺🇸
116	Cleveland Noir 2023Buy 🇺🇸
117	East Jerusalem Noir 2023Buy 🇺🇸
118	West Jerusalem Noir 2023Buy 🇺🇸
119	Honolulu Noir 2024Buy 🇺🇸
120	Hamburg Noir 2025Buy 🇺🇸
121	Sacramento Noir 2025Buy 🇺🇸

5 books (1965–2008)

Start with Island Voices, the first of 5 books in the Anthologies series.

#	Title
1	Island Voices 1965Buy 🇺🇸
2	From The Green Antilles Writings Of The Caribbean 1967Buy 🇺🇸
3	The Oxford Book of Caribbean Short Stories 1999Buy 🇺🇸
4	A Tangled Web 2005Buy 🇺🇸
5	Four Continents 2008Buy 🇺🇸

4 books (1967–2004)

Start with A Flag on the Island, the first of 4 books in the Collections series.

#	Title
1	A Flag on the Island 1967Buy 🇺🇸
2	Collected Short Fiction 1971Buy 🇺🇸
3	The Nightwatchman's Occurrence Book 2002Buy 🇺🇸
4	Vintage Naipaul 2004Buy 🇺🇸

3 books (1964–1990)

Start with An Area of Darkness and read in order.

#	Title
1	An Area of Darkness 1964Buy 🇺🇸
2	A Wounded Civilization 1976Buy 🇺🇸
3	A Million Mutinies Now 1990Buy 🇺🇸

97 books (1969–2023)

Start with Conversations with Jorge Luis Borges, the first of 97 books in the Literary Conversations series.

#	Title
1	Conversations with Jorge Luis Borges 1969Buy 🇺🇸
2	Conversations with Czeslaw Milosz 1981Buy 🇺🇸
3	Conversations with Graham Greene 1983Buy 🇺🇸
4	Conversations With Isaac Bashevis Singer 1985Buy 🇺🇸
5	Conversations with Eudora Welty 1985Buy 🇺🇸
6	Conversations with Walker Percy 1985Buy 🇺🇸
7	Conversations with William Styron 1985Buy 🇺🇸
8	Conversations with Ernest Hemingway 1986Buy 🇺🇸
9	Conversations with Lillian Hellman 1986Buy 🇺🇸
10	Conversations with Malcolm Cowley 1986Buy 🇺🇸
11	Conversations with Tennessee Williams 1986Buy 🇺🇸
12	Conversations with Arthur Miller 1987Buy 🇺🇸
13	Conversations with Flannery O'Connor 1987Buy 🇺🇸
14	Conversations with Katherine Anne Porter 1987Buy 🇺🇸
15	Conversations with Peter Taylor 1987Buy 🇺🇸
16	Truman Capote: Conversations 1987Buy 🇺🇸
17	Conversations with Edward Albee 1988Buy 🇺🇸
18	Conversations with Erskine Caldwell 1988Buy 🇺🇸
19	Conversations with Kurt Vonnegut 1988Buy 🇺🇸
20	Conversations with Norman Mailer 1988Buy 🇺🇸
21	Conversations with James Baldwin 1989Buy 🇺🇸
22	Conversations with Joyce Carol Oates 1989Buy 🇺🇸
23	Conversations with Robert Graves 1989Buy 🇺🇸
24	Conversations with Robertson Davies 1989Buy 🇺🇸
25	Conversations with Shelby Foote 1989Buy 🇺🇸
26	Conversations with Eugene O'Neill 1990Buy 🇺🇸
27	Conversations with John Gardner 1990Buy 🇺🇸
28	Conversations with Raymond Carver 1990Buy 🇺🇸
29	Conversations with Richard Wilbur 1990Buy 🇺🇸
30	Conversations with Tom Wolfe 1990Buy 🇺🇸
31	Conversations with Bernard Malamud 1991Buy 🇺🇸
32	Conversations with Elizabeth Spencer 1991Buy 🇺🇸
33	Conversations with Reynolds Price 1991Buy 🇺🇸
34	Conversations With Thornton Wilder 1992Buy 🇺🇸
35	Conversations with M. F. K. Fisher 1992Buy 🇺🇸
36	Conversations with Nikki Giovanni 1992Buy 🇺🇸
37	Conversations with Robert Coles 1992Buy 🇺🇸
38	Conversations with Paul Bowles 1993Buy 🇺🇸
39	Conversations with Richard Wright 1993Buy 🇺🇸
40	More Conversations with Walker Percy 1993Buy 🇺🇸
41	Conversations with Amiri Baraka 1994Buy 🇺🇸
42	Conversations with Henry Miller 1994Buy 🇺🇸
43	Conversations with Louise Erdrich and Michael Dorris 1994Buy 🇺🇸
44	Conversations with Saul Bellow 1994Buy 🇺🇸
45	Conversations with Toni Morrison 1994Buy 🇺🇸
46	Conversations With S.J. Perelman 1995Buy 🇺🇸
47	Conversations with Chester Himes 1995Buy 🇺🇸
48	Conversations with Ernest Gaines 1995Buy 🇺🇸
49	Conversations with Ishmael Reed 1995Buy 🇺🇸
50	Conversations with Ralph Ellison 1995Buy 🇺🇸
51	Conversations with Susan Sontag 1995Buy 🇺🇸
52	Conversations with Derek Walcott 1996Buy 🇺🇸
53	Conversations with Elizabeth Bishop 1996Buy 🇺🇸
54	Conversations with Pauline Kael 1996Buy 🇺🇸
55	More Conversations with Eudora Welty 1996Buy 🇺🇸
56	Conversations with Chinua Achebe 1997Buy 🇺🇸
57	Conversations with N. Scott Momaday 1997Buy 🇺🇸
58	Conversations with V. S. Naipaul 1997Buy 🇺🇸
59	Conversations with Denise Levertov 1998Buy 🇺🇸
60	Conversations with Maxine Hong Kingston 1998Buy 🇺🇸
61	Conversations With John Fowles 1999Buy 🇺🇸
62	Conversations With William Faulkner 1999Buy 🇺🇸
63	Conversations with E. L. Doctorow 1999Buy 🇺🇸
64	Conversations with Leslie Marmon Silko 2000Buy 🇺🇸
65	Conversations with Salman Rushdie 2000Buy 🇺🇸
66	Conversations with William S. Burroughs 2000Buy 🇺🇸
67	Conversations with Chaim Potok 2001Buy 🇺🇸
68	Conversations with Christopher Isherwood 2001Buy 🇺🇸
69	Conversations with Richard Ford 2001Buy 🇺🇸
70	Conversations with Clarence Major 2002Buy 🇺🇸
71	Conversations with Erica Jong 2002Buy 🇺🇸
72	Conversations with Jim Harrison 2002Buy 🇺🇸
73	Conversations with Margaret Walker 2002Buy 🇺🇸
74	Conversations with Mary Gordon 2002Buy 🇺🇸
75	Elie Wiesel: Conversations 2002Buy 🇺🇸
76	Conversations with F. Scott Fitzgerald 2003Buy 🇺🇸
77	Conversations with Gwendolyn Brooks 2003Buy 🇺🇸
78	Conversations with Rita Dove 2003Buy 🇺🇸
79	Conversations with Stanley Kaufmann 2003Buy 🇺🇸
80	Joseph Brodsky: Conversations 2003Buy 🇺🇸
81	Conversations With John le Carré 2004Buy 🇺🇸
82	Conversations with Audre Lorde 2004Buy 🇺🇸
83	Conversations with Gloria Naylor 2004Buy 🇺🇸
84	Conversations with Ray Bradbury 2004Buy 🇺🇸
85	Conversations with Don DeLillo 2005Buy 🇺🇸
86	Conversations with Gabriel García Márquez 2005Buy 🇺🇸
87	Conversations with Gore Vidal 2005Buy 🇺🇸
88	Conversations with Isaac Asimov 2005Buy 🇺🇸
89	Conversations with Jack Kerouac 2005Buy 🇺🇸
90	Conversations with Robert Penn Warren 2005Buy 🇺🇸
91	Conversations with Thomas McGuane 2006Buy 🇺🇸
92	Conversations with Larry Brown 2007Buy 🇺🇸
93	Conversations with Leon Forrest 2007Buy 🇺🇸
94	Conversations with Sonia Sanchez 2007Buy 🇺🇸
95	Conversations with Wendell Berry 2007Buy 🇺🇸
96	Conversations with Kazuo Ishiguro 2008Buy 🇺🇸
97	Conversations with Jimmy Carter 2023Buy 🇺🇸

15 books (1962–2018)

Start with The Middle Passage, the first of 15 books in the Non-Fiction series.

#	Title
1	The Middle Passage 1962Buy 🇺🇸
2	Reading and Writing 1968Buy 🇺🇸
3	The Loss of El Dorado 1969Buy 🇺🇸
4	The Perfect Tenants and the Mourners 1977Buy 🇺🇸
5	A Congo Diary 1980Buy 🇺🇸
6	The Return of Eva Peron 1980Buy 🇺🇸
7	Among the Believers 1981Buy 🇺🇸
8	A Turn In The South 1989Buy 🇺🇸
9	Beyond Belief 1998Buy 🇺🇸
10	Between Father and Son 1999Buy 🇺🇸
11	The Writer and the World 2002Buy 🇺🇸
12	Literary Occasions 2003Buy 🇺🇸
13	A Writer's People 2007Buy 🇺🇸
14	The Masque of Africa 2010Buy 🇺🇸
15	India Essays 2018Buy 🇺🇸

13 books (1867–1994)

Start with The Mimic Men, the first of 13 books in the Standalone Novels series.

#	Title
1	The Mimic Men 1867Buy 🇺🇸
2	The Mystic Masseur 1957Buy 🇺🇸
3	The Suffrage of Elvira 1958Buy 🇺🇸
4	Miguel Street 1959Buy 🇺🇸
5	A House for Mr Biswas 1961Buy 🇺🇸
6	Mr Stone And The Knights Companion 1963Buy 🇺🇸
7	In a Free State 1971Buy 🇺🇸
8	Guerrillas 1975Buy 🇺🇸
9	A Bend in the River 1979Buy 🇺🇸
10	Finding the Center 1984Buy 🇺🇸
11	Overcrowded Barracoon 1984Buy 🇺🇸
12	The Enigma of Arrival 1987Buy 🇺🇸
13	A Way in the World 1994Buy 🇺🇸

2 books (2001–2004)

Start with Half a Life and read in order.

#	Title
1	Half a Life 2001Buy 🇺🇸
2	Magic Seeds 2004Buy 🇺🇸