Miguel Street

Miguel Street is a semi-autobiographical novel by V. S. Naipaul about childhood in wartime Port-of-Spain, Trinidad and Tobago. The book deals with a number of remarkable characters including Mr. Popo, the carpenter who never finished a single thing but was always working on the thing without a name, the poet B. Wordsworth who was working on the greatest poem ever written (but never got beyond the first line, The past is deep), and Man-Man, the mad man who became a prophet. The book, both intensely funny and bitterly painful, is the story of great ambitions which never got anywhere. Only the narrator, Naipaul himself, manages to escape from Miguel Street and leave Trinidad, with the hope of making something of himself.

Miguel Street was Naipaul's first novel. He wrote it while employed at the BBC using a BBC typewriter and "rustle-fre paper".

But the people of Miguel Street were always romancers