The people who live in Miguel Street make excellent company; attractive, eccentric, comic, sometimes moving, their adventures and misadventures are the subject of V. S. Naipaul"s third book. The street is in Port of Spain, Trinidad, and life there is seen through the eyes of the narrator, a young "street "rab", at a time of the town"s transition from the quiet backwater of pre-war days to the booming city it is now. He introduces us to many characters as intriguing as their names: Hat and Bogart, Bhacku the mechanical genius, Titus Hoyte, I.A., the educationalist, Eddoes who drives a scavenger cart - an aristocrat of the street, Morgan the "pyrotechnicist", Laura whose eight children have seven fathers, Big Foot the boxer, Man-man with his strange longing for martyrdom, and B. Wordsworth the poet. By the end of the book we know these people intimately, and the community they form has become familiar without loosing it"s fascination. "Miguel Street" is subtle and amusing and discerning readers will find beneath the wit a humanity and a serious purpose.