Fireflies is a novel 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...

 originally published in 1970. It was his first book, a comic novel set in Trinidad

Trinidad

Trinidad is the larger and more populous of the two major islands and numerous landforms which make up the island nation of Trinidad and Tobago. It is the southernmost island in the Caribbean and lies just off the northeastern coast of Venezuela. With an area of it is also the fifth largest in...

. In an essay in An Unfinished Journey

An Unfinished Journey

An Unfinished Journey is a posthumous collection of essays by Shiva Naipaul, published by Hamish and Hamilton in 1986.The foreword is written by the author's father-in-law, Douglas Stuart, who creates a short biographical sketch of the author, describing Shiva as a writer who gained in discipline...

, Naipaul described how in 1968 as a final year student at Oxford University studying Chinese, he had been moved to write down a sentence, which proved to be the beginning of his first novel, which he then worked on for the next two years. The novel was hailed on publication, winning the Jock Campbell New Statesman Award, the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize

John Llewellyn Rhys Prize

The John Llewellyn Rhys Prize is a literary prize awarded annually for the best work of literature by an author from the Commonwealth aged 35 or under, written in English and published in the United Kingdom...

 and the Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize.

Writer Martin Amis

Martin Amis

Martin Louis Amis is a British novelist, the author of many novels including Money and London Fields . He is currently Professor of Creative Writing at the Centre for New Writing at the University of Manchester, but will step down at the end of the 2010/11 academic year...

said of Fireflies