Swami and Friends

His greatest passion is the m cc - the malgudi cricket club - which he founds together with his friends: his greatest day is when the examinations are over and school breaks up - a time for revelry and cheerful ritousness but the innocent and impulsive swami lands in trouble when he is carried away by the more serious unrest of india in 1930 somehow he gets himself expelled from two schools in succession, and when things have gone quite out of hand he is forced to run away from home this is far more than a simple narrative of swamis adventures - charming and entertaining as they are by the delicate sympathetically observed, the author establishes for us the childs world as the child himself sees it: and beyond, the adult community he will one day belong to - in swamis case, the town of malgudi, which provides the setting of almost all narayans later novels

R. K. Narayan's writing spanned the greatest period of change in modern Indian history, from the days of the Raj with Swami and Friends (1935), The Bachelor of Arts (1937) and The English Teacher (1945), to recent years of political unrest - The Painter of Signs (1976), A Tiger for Malgudi (1983), and Talkative Man (1987). He has published numerous collections of short stories, including Malgudi Days (1982) and Under The Banyan Tree (1985), and several works of non-fiction. His most recent work is The Grandmother's Tale: Three Novellas (1993). R.K. Narayan died in 2001.