A Way in the World

Spanning continents and centuries and defying literary categories, this novel tells intersecting stories whose protagonists include the disgraced and half-demented Sir Walter Raleigh fruitlessly seeking El Dorado in the New World; the foppish nineteenth-century insurgent Francisco Miranda, who in his quest to liberate South America becomes entangled in his own fantasies and borrowed ideas; and the doomed Blair, a present-day Caribbean revolutionary stranded and eventually martyred - in East Africa. Among these characters 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 and ours.