R. K. Narayan’s Talkative Man is a slim, comic novel set in the fictional South Indian town of Malgudi, suddenly deranged by the arrival of a mysterious stranger.

The narrator, known mostly as TM — Talkative Man, naturally; no false advertising from Narayan — becomes entangled with a visitor calling himself Dr Rann, whose grand claims, odd secrecy, and bureaucratic evasions begin to unsettle the town’s rhythms.

Narayan is one of the great quiet comic stylists of twentieth-century fiction: deceptively plain, beautifully paced, and allergic to melodrama even when his plots are full of frauds, dreamers, eccentrics, officials, and men talking themselves into ridiculous corners. This is late Narayan: dry, economical, gently absurd, and built around the pleasure of narrative itself — gossip as architecture, rumour as civic weather.

First edition. Hardback, William Heinemann, first published in Great Britain 1986. Ex-library book. Dust jacket present, with visible fading/shelf wear and some edge rubbing; book internally clean.