A Way in the World

Nobel Prize winner V. S. Naipaul intertwines memory and history to create 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 19th 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.