A Way in the World

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What to expect

In a vastly innovative novel, Nobel Prize winner V. S. Naipaul intertwines memory and history to create what is at once an autobiography and an ambitious fictional archaeology of colonialism.

Spanning continents and centuries and defying literary categories, A Way in the World tells intersecting stories whose protagonists include the disgraced and half-demented Sir Walter Raleigh who seeks El Dorado in the New World; the nineteenth-century insurgent Francisco Miranda, who becomes entangled in his own fantasies and borrowed ideas; and the doomed Blair, a present-day Caribbean revolutionary stranded in East Africa. Among these presences is a narrator who bears a telling resemblance to Naipaul himself: a Trinidadian writer of Indian ancestry and English residence boldly trying to come to terms with the mystery and transience that is his inheritance.

Critics Review

  • “Dickensian…A brilliant new prism through which to view [Naipaul’s] life and work.”

    New York Times

  • “A bewitching piece of work by a mind at the peak of its abilities.”

    New York Times Book Review

  • “Memorably narrated by Simon Vance. Vance is the very expression of the voice we hear when we read Naipaul: measured, judicious, worldly-wise…Vance’s balanced, expertly paced delivery conveys as well the passion and conviction that underlie Naipaul’s marvelous prose.”

    AudioFile

  • “Naipaul’s mastery of his material is absolute, and his seemingly effortless, beautifully wrought prose carries the reader to the heart of the mysteries of human destiny.”

    Publishers Weekly

  • “Explore[s] the sources and implications of his feelings of rootlessness, the realities of the colonial experience, the impact of cultural displacement, and our need to belong…A work from a fine and thoughtful storyteller.”

    Library Journal

  • “Naipaul more than anybody else embodies what it means to be a writer.”

    Observer (London), praise for the author

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