Fireflies

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Shiva Naipaul was the brother of V. S. Naipaul and author of Firefles and The Chip-Chip Gatherers. Fireflies, his first novel, published in 1970 and longlisted for the 'Lost Man Booker Award' in 2010, is set in Naipaul's native Trinidad. It includes a new foreword by Amit Chaudhuri. 
 
The Khojas are Trinidad's most venerated Hindu family. Rigidly orthodox, presiding over acres of ill-kept sugarcane and hoards of jewellery enthusiastically guarded by old Mrs Khoja, they seem to have triumphed more by default than by anything else. Only 'Baby' Khoja, who is parcelled off into an arranged marriage with a blustering bus driver, proves an exception to this rule. Her heroic story - of resourcefulness, strength and survival - is the gleaming thread in Shiva Naipaul's ferociously comic and profoundly sad first novel.

Shiva Naipaul was born in Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago, in 1945, the younger brother of the novelist V. S. Naipaul. Having won a scholarship to study Chinese at University College, Oxford, he emigrated to England, where he met and later married Jenny Stuart. He wrote two novels - Fireflies (1970) and The Chip-Chip Gatherers (1973) - before turning to non-fiction. His book North of South, an account of his travels in Africa, is published in Penguin Modern Classics. Later works included the novel A Hot Country, as well as a collection of fiction and non-fiction, Beyond the Dragon's Mouth. Naipaul died from a heart attack in August 1985, aged forty. 
 
Amit Chaudhuri was born in Calcutta in 1962, and grew up in Bombay. He read English at University College, London and completed his doctorate on D.H. Lawrence at Balliol College, Oxford. He has written five novels: A Strange and Sublime Address; Afternoon Raag; Freedom Song; A New World; and The Immortals, which was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best Book. He is now Professor in Contemporary Literature at the University of East Anglia and was made Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2009.

An African Journey

North of South

In the 1970s Shiva Naipaul travelled to Africa, visiting Kenya, Tanzania and Zambia for several months. Through his experiences, the places he visited and his various encounters, he aimed to discover what 'liberation', 'revolution' and 'socialism' meant to the ordinary people. His journey of discovery is brilliantly documented in this intimate, comic and controversial portrayal of a continent on the brink of change.

Shiva Naipaul

Books by Shiva Naipaul

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