The main two settings of the novel both reflect the author's life where she lived in Manhattan and where she worked in a POW camp in Britain in World War II.

The novel itself, however, would not appear until 1973, much changed from its original incarnation, as Spark herself would confide during a 1970 interview with the Guardian newspaper: ‘I’m so interested in the present tense that I’ve redone a book I’ve been working on for three years,The Hot House by the East River, and put it all in the present tense.’ ... the novel she would eventually pen about New York would be one of her strangest, most jarring works, painting an unflattering portrait of the city's wealthier denizens and their spiritually empty lives...' Wealthy couple Paul and Elsa live in 1970's Manhattan overlooking the East River with throwbacks to 1944 Britain where they started their relationship.

Paul notices that Elsa always has a fixed shadow, and doubts her sanity and her analyst Garven is always on her beck and call.

But Paul believes that Kiel died, in fact there appears to be some question on whether the book's main characters themselves may not be alive... At the time Richard P. Brickner writing in The New York Times is positive "Muriel Spark's new novel is, in effect, a witty, mysterious, illuminating dream; Muriel Spark's dream, but more or less ours too.

It is an approach she occasionally takes too far: at the end of Hothouse, readers discover with a dizzy plunge that all the protagonists are dead and have been since the opening page.