In its implacable depiction of one of those anterooms to hell that liberated Third World countries seem doomed to become, [A Hot Country] is impressive; but it has an odd air of being no more than the first draft of another novel, far fuller of incidents and characters. Just as the flood of the colonisers' dreams of untold wealth soon dwindled to a trickle and was then lost in sand, so the flood of the narrative, so confident at first, also thins away. The last two pages are superb in their evocation of a world of void, darkness and unspecified hunger, in which people, robbed of their souls by their former conquerors and exploiters, now have only one genuine desire left to them: 'To wreak vengeance. To tear down. To burn. To loot. To insult. To kill.' But it is impossible not to feel disappointment with a...