A book about displacement, power, and the humiliations of freedom.

In a Free State is built as a linked sequence rather than a conventional novel, moving through travel, migration, exile and political instability before arriving at its central title piece, set in an unnamed African state on the brink of violence.

The people in it are always in transit and never quite at home, whether crossing borders, passing through other people’s countries, or discovering that freedom can be another form of exposure. Less a comforting narrative than a study in estrangement, empire and rootlessness from one of the twentieth century’s most contentious and technically controlled writers.

Penguin paperback edition. Later Penguin reprint. Good condition overall. Light rubbing and general shelf wear to wraps, with some edge wear and creasing visible; binding sound; interior clean and unmarked.