[3] Shiva Naipaul did not receive much positive acclaim from reviewers in his lifetime, although he won the Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize for best regional novel from the Royal Society of Literature for Fireflies (1970).

[5]In 1985, Anglo-Nigerian scholar and writer Adewale Maja-Pearce said that the Naipaul brothers' portrayals of Africa were overly informed by their "slavish worship of an alien tradition which they have adopted wholesale and which they use to measure everything that falls outside it".

[6] In 2004, Kenyan literature scholar Tom Odhiambo made a similar critique, saying Shiva Naipaul's portrayal of East Africa in North of South: An African Journey suffered from its over-reliance on existing Western accounts (a "biased archive") of the wider continent.

The result is a travelogue filled with a great sense of personal disappointment with the political, cultural, economic and social conditions in postcolonial Kenya, Tanzania and Zambia – the countries that he visits.

[4][1] Martin Amis wrote, in his obituary for Naipaul, "The moment I finished his first novel, Fireflies [1970], I felt delight in being alive at the same time as such a writer … there are many people with whom I can initiate a long train of quotation — and laughter — from that book alone.

Ledent says that ultimately: While the younger Naipaul brother’s ambiguous travel narratives may be an index to his own development from a rather binary view of history in North of South to a subtler vision in An Unfinished Journey, they also point to the difficulty of achieving self-knowledge, especially as a diasporic individual, and they are suggestive of an unresolved tension.

As a traveller in search of self-definition he is indeed divided between a genuine desire to 'clear up misconceptions' about the postcolonial world, and a tendency to regard his subjects with some contempt, an attitude that often translates into a scathing tone reminiscent of that adopted by his elder brother in his own travelogues.

He commends Naipaul's "immaculate prose style" and says "Living in Earl's Court" is "an important work of Windrush literature and an interrogation of its author’s wanderlust".

[4] The novelist Martin Amis wrote that "Shiva Naipaul was one of those people who caused your heart to lift when he entered the room ... in losing him, we have lost thirty years of untranscribed, unvarnished genius".