Goodreads asked C.Y. Gopinath:

Where did you get the idea for your most recent book?

C.Y. Gopinath In my newest book, Hoyt's War, I've done something that is probably a literary first — I took a story that I had already published, and rewrote it entirely within a completely different socio-cultural setting and geography.

The Book of Answers, a sharp political satire of the extreme right set in India, was shortlisted for the 2012 Commonwealth Book Prize for Best Fiction — but in India, its sales were in the hundreds, possibly because of sloppy marketing.

In 2013, after my literary agent in the US told me that the India setting was making it a difficult sale in the US, I began re-writing The Book of Answers as an American story. — the result was Hoyt's War, one sale now at amazon.com.

It was an extraordinary and exhilarating exercise. The book unwittingly mirrors the roughhouse lunacy of American politics in the age of Donald Trump. My US president, Barry Codbag, is so much like Trump that I risk being called opportunistic, but the truth is that Codbag came before Trump.

The story is set in 2020, after four years of Codbag's (read: Trump's) government has made America the most revile and ridiculed nation on earth. I don't want to spoil your fun, but the book is a mixture of George Orwell and Lewis Carroll, with six impossible things at every turn.

I wrote about places I've never visited — Tribeca in New York, a plantation called Shongaloo in Louisiana; a circus town called Gibsonton near Tampa, Florida; and the streets of Miami. I did it by spending weeks with Google Street View to explore American neighborhoods that featured in my story.

My characters are American, the politics is Americans, and you will feel uneasy even as you laugh at the madness.

Please read it, Please recommend it. Please share with Democrats and Republicans. It will delight one, and madden the other.

Please give a copy to your local congressman.

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