Swami and Friends

Swami is ten years old, and life for him consists mainly of having adventures with his friends, avoiding the misery of homework, and coping as best as he can with the teachers and other adults he encounters. His greatest passion is the M.C.C.- 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 to riverly and cheerful riotousness. 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 Swami's adventures - charming and entertaining as they are. By the delicate use of detail sympathetically observed, the author establishes for us the child's world as the child himself sees it: and beyond, the adult community he will one day belong to - in Swami's case, the town of Malgudi, which provides the setting of almost all Narayan's later novels.

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