A Way In The World - Couverture souple

'His own modern labour of love, loss and disquiet, this really is a book to treasure' - Malcolm Bradbury, Sunday Express

In his first fiction for seven years, V.S. Naipaul ranges across the centuries and the oceans, re-creating Walter Raleigh's doomed expedition to the Orinoco, the down-at-heel literary London of the 1950's, Miranda's disatreous invasion of South America. Opening in Port of Spain with Leonard Side, a mortician and decorator of cakes, and closing with a brutal murder in Africa, A Way in the World is an extraordinary, multi-layered portrait of individuals caught in the slip-stream of history.

'Everyone in this book is involved in a grave, beautiful, tragic dance ... Naipaul is one of the finest writers working today and this large, various and artful book is among his best' - Lucy Hughes-Hallett, The Times

'Characters, ideas, events from his past are elegantly juggled, set down and picked up again with a technical brilliance that comes from a life-time's experience' - Caryl Phillips, New Republic

'It takes only one paragraph of this book to see that Naipaul is at the peak of his ability: a man of profound insight and subtlety, writing in charming, evocative (and deceptively simple) prose - Cressida Connolly, Tatler

"There is not a page that is not stamped with Naipaul's compelling charm and peculiar authority...he retains, somehow or other, a sense of wonder at the varieties of human experience and the infinite vagaries of human behaviour" (Scotsman)

"One of literature's senior players, a writer whose work - nimble in defence, formidable in attack - is impossible to dismiss... it is the seriousness and delicacy of his concerns that capture and keep our attention. Wherever he has been - which is almost everywhere - he has stalked the anxieties and vanities of post-colonial life with fantastic zeal and subtlety." (Independent)

"The language is marvellously sculpted" (Economist)