A Hot Country was the last novel to be written by Shiva Naipaul

Shiva Naipaul

Shiva Naipaul , born Shivadhar Srivinasa Naipaul in Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago, was a Trinidadian and British novelist and journalist.Shiva Naipaul was the younger brother of novelist V. S. Naipaul...

 and also his shortest in length. It was published in 1983.

Before its publication, he had not written a novel in ten years. A Hot Country departs from the comic style of his earlier novels Fireflies and The Chip-Chip Gatherers

The Chip-Chip Gatherers

The Chip-Chip Gatherers is a novel by Shiva Naipaul originally published in 1973 by Penguin Books. It was reprinted in a new edition as a Penguin Twentieth Century Classic in 1997. It is a comic story following a cast of colourful Hindu and Muslim characters of Indian descent in a large village in...

.

It is set during an election in the fictional Caribbean

Caribbean

The Caribbean is a crescent-shaped group of islands more than 2,000 miles long separating the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean Sea, to the west and south, from the Atlantic Ocean, to the east and north...

 country of Cuyama, thought to be based on Guyana

Guyana

Guyana , officially the Co-operative Republic of Guyana, previously the colony of British Guiana, is a sovereign state on the northern coast of South America that is culturally part of the Anglophone Caribbean. Guyana was a former colony of the Dutch and of the British...

 where Naipaul had researched his book Black & White

Black & White (book)

Black & White is a non-fiction book written by Shiva Naipaul and published by Hamish Hamilton in the U.K. in 1980. It was published with the title Journey to Nowhere: A New World Tragedy in the U.S...

 about the Jonestown Massacre, which profoundly affected him.