<p>In a narrative that moves with dreamlike swiftness from India to England to Africa Nobel Laureate V. S. Naipaul has produced his finest novel to date a bleakly resonant study of the fraudulent bargains that make up an identity.</p><p>The son of a Brahmin ascetic and his lower-caste wife Willie Chandran grows up sensing the hollowness at the core of his father's self-denial and vowing to live more authentically. That search takes him to the immigrant and literary bohemias of 1950s London to a facile and unsatisfying career as a writer and at last to a decaying Portuguese colony in East Africa where he finds a happiness he will then be compelled to betray.</P><P>Brilliantly orchestrated at once elegiac and devastating in its portraits of colonial grandeur and pretension <i>Half a Life</i> represents the pinnacle of Naipaul's career.</p>