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A Way in the World
- A Novel
- Narrated by: Simon Vance
- Length: 11 hrs and 41 mins
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Publisher's summary
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 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.
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Set in Burma during the British invasion of 1885, this masterly novel by Amitav Ghosh tells the story of Rajkumar, a poor boy lifted on the tides of political and social chaos, who goes on to create an empire in the Burmese teak forest. When soldiers force the royal family out of the Glass Palace and into exile, Rajkumar befriends Dolly, a young woman in the court of the Burmese Queen, whose love will shape his life. He cannot forget her, and years later, as a rich man, he goes in search of her.
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I struggled to finish... enough said.
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In an Antique Land
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Once upon a time an Indian writer name Amitav Ghosh set out to find an Indian slave, name unknown, who some 700 years before had traveled to the Middle East. The journey took him to a small village in Egypt, where medieval customs coexist with 20th-century desires and discontents. But even as Ghosh sought to re-create the life of his Indian predecessor, he found himself immersed in those of his modern Egyptian neighbors.
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Mixed Worlds
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Slaves in the Family
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The Ball family hails from South Carolina - Charleston and thereabouts. Their plantations were among the oldest and longest-standing plantations in the South. Between 1698 and 1865, close to 4,000 Black people were born into slavery under the Balls or were bought by them. In Slaves in the Family, Edward Ball recounts his efforts to track down and meet the descendants of his family's slaves.
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Gives a good insight for moving forward today
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A Woman in Arabia
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Gertrude Bell was leaning in 100 years before Sheryl Sandberg. One of the great woman adventurers of the 20th century, she turned her back on Victorian society to study at Oxford and travel the world and became the chief architect of British policy in the Middle East after World War I. Mountaineer, archaeologist, Arabist, writer, poet, linguist, and spy, she dedicated her life to championing the Arab cause and was instrumental in drawing the borders that define today's Middle East.
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Raw historiography of a spectacular heroine
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The Darling is Hannah Musgrave's story, told emotionally and convincingly years later by Hannah herself. A political radical and member of the Weather Underground, Hannah has fled America to West Africa, where she and her Liberian husband become friends and colleagues of Charles Taylor, the notorious warlord and now ex-president of Liberia. When Taylor leaves for the United States in an effort to escape embezzlement charges, he's immediately placed in prison.
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Complex and compelling
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In the late 1890s, Edmund Dene Morel, a young British shipping company agent, noticed something strange about the cargoes of his company's ships as they arrived from and departed for the Congo. Incoming ships were crammed with valuable ivory and rubber. Outbound ships carried little more than soldiers and firearms. Correctly concluding that only slave labor could account for these cargoes, Morel almost singlehandedly made this slave-labor regime the premier human rights story in the world.
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Fascinating
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From the Man Booker Prize-nominated author of Sleeping on Jupiter, The Folded Earth, and An Atlas of Impossible Longing, a poignant and sweeping novel set in India during World War II and the present day about a son’s quest to uncover the truth about his mother....
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Beautiful book
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Nine Continents
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Xiaolu Guo has traveled further than most to become who she needed to be. Now, as she experiences the birth of her daughter in a London maternity ward surrounded by women from all over the world, she looks back on that journey. It begins in the fishing village shack on the East China Sea where her illiterate grandparents raised her, and brings her to a rapidly changing Beijing, full of contradictions: a thriving underground art scene amid mass censorship, curious Westerners who held out affection only to disappear back home.
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must read
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On the outskirts of a town 30 miles from Istanbul, a master well digger and his young apprentice are hired to find water on a barren plain. As they struggle in the summer heat, excavating without luck meter by meter, the two will develop a filial bond neither has known before - not the poor middle-aged bachelor nor the middle-class boy whose father disappeared after being arrested for politically subversive activities. The pair will come to depend on each other and exchange stories reflecting disparate views of the world.
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Drags On
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Put Out More Flags
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Upper-class scoundrel Basil Seal, mad, bad, and dangerous to know, creates havoc wherever he goes, much to the despair of the three women in his life - his sister, his mother, and his mistress. When Neville Chamberlain declares war on Germany, it seems the perfect opportunity for more action and adventure. So Basil follows the call to arms and sets forth to enjoy his finest hour - as a war hero. Basil's instincts for self-preservation come to the fore as he insinuates himself into the Ministry of Information and a little-known section of Military Security.
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Wickedly Funny
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Pearl Buck in China
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The author of the much honored two-volume biography of Henri Matisse unearths the life and work of the Nobel Prize and Pulitzer Prize winner Pearl Buck, whose novels in the 1930's and 40's were the first written for a Western audience to describe ordinary life in the still secret China of the late 19th and early 20th century.
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Very good
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By: Hilary Spurling
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What listeners say about A Way in the World
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- JK
- 09-14-21
ENJOYE
An other masterfully written book by V.S. Naipaul.
It is a collection of short stories, written as an autobiography.
The narrator, Simon Vance, reads the book at a fast pace, so don’t let your mind wander, JK
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- AuntGert
- 04-01-21
Rather a slog
Although described as a novel, this book reads like a history lesson with multiple historical facts, descriptions, and citations frequently repeated. Despite such repetitions, the speakers in the history selections are hard to separate and then you find that confusion doesn’t matter so much because these imagined conversations are not especially interesting or entertaining. If Naipaul includes the backstory of colonized Trinidad as a way to understand the island of his upbringing, it’s odd that he only focuses his history on the 17 & 18th C Spanish and British invasions with little to no focus on the Indian diaspora to which he belongs.
Also, as great a reader Simon Vance is, he’s a peculiar choice for this book. Did Naipaul develop a posh upper class Brit accent, abandoning his Trinidadian accent when going to Oxford University? The book is told from three different first person narratives, with only one (Sir Walter Raleigh) being an educated Englishman. Therefore, Vance’s accent and manner of speaking seem to belong to someone other than a Trinidad or a Venezuelan general.
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- Yas
- 11-01-20
Biographical pathway
This a Biographical pathway through the life of a wonderful writer. Not since reading the biographies of Gandhi & Churchill have I come across a more remarkable personality of their likeness.
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2 people found this helpful
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- Anonymous User
- 08-08-21
Riveting
Everyone, especially Naipaul's many detractors, would benefit from giving this a listen. And it is narrated especially well.
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- tomasito
- 08-28-19
An inspired and brilliant voice for our times
Naipaul’s extraordinary writing talent combined with his unique experience of the preserved traditions of India transposed to the Colonial Backwaters of the new world give him special insights and expression of the complexity of history that only the novel can provide. A Way in the World is an excellent example.
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1 person found this helpful
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- John A.
- 03-12-22
A great book
A fantastic book that is very well written. I found this book to be developmental and maturative to a young man coming of age like myself. I very much like the author and further highly recommend this book.
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- Norman Johnson
- 09-16-18
ugh!
struggled to get through it. Not a good choice for such a good narrator like Vance
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4 people found this helpful
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- Joy
- 08-08-21
Do not bother
it's the way the author or rather the narrator says about black as if it is the nastiest thing he's ever had to say and then he says colored occasionally and I'm not really sure if he understands that that word isn't used in a modern-day book and this book is not taking place in the time frame that would make it colored ethnicity or race not for me don't think anybody black would enjoy it by the way black is the word to use not colored not Niger not black in the way it was spoken
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