Michael Westlake

World Enough Michael Westlake

The world of World Enough is configured differently. From the opening page the reader is confronted by a succession of "anomalies" that create a transform of the world we are familiar with. Set against the backcloth of an imagined history spanning Russia, France, Greater Israel, the United States of Africa and the colonies of North America engaged in a war of liberation, World Enough is narrated in a series of flashbacks and varied temporal registers by the novel's four main characters: Katerina and Padua, sisters born in pre-revolutionary Russia, and two Africans, Quaque and Million M'loy. Their four accounts, switching back and forth throughout the novel, complement and sometimes contradict each other in their construction of an epic tale of romance, espionage, chess, geopolitics, war and the prolongation of people's natural lifespan, running from the early 20th century through to some unspecified time in the 21st.