Fireflies

Description

A comic-tragic family novel and a classic of Trinidadian literature Set in Trinidad, Shiva Naipaul's birthplace, Fireflies (first published in 1970) is a chronicle of the fortunes of Vimla Lutchman, nicknamed Baby, a member of the powerful and wealthy Khoja family. As her disastrous marriage to a local bus driver unravels, Baby scrapes a living by running a roadside vegetable stall and finds compensation in trading, in her children, in fortune-tellers and finally in solitude.

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.