Between 1945 and 2001, there was no greater U.S. disaster than Jonestown. On Nov. 18, 1978, 918 Americans, including over 300 children, died in the mass murder-suicide orchestrated by cult leader Jim Jones, a preacher turned revolutionary leader. After his followers murdered a U.S. congressman who had come to investigate human rights abuses at Jonestown, a paranoid Jones believed the end was nigh, and he pushed his commune to drink cyanide-laced fruit punch, some voluntarily, some at gunpoint. For weeks, the story dominated front pages in the United States. Even today, Kool-Aid, the flavored drink powder, carries dark associations—even though the actual poisoned drink was a lesser-known brand, Flavor Aid.

But this very American story took place outside U.S. borders, in the tiny South American country of Guyana. Jones’s cult, the Peoples Temple, had decamped there to found its own colony, with approval from the Guyanese government, after increasing scrutiny over the Temple’s practices and finances in the United States. For most of the reporters and authors who flocked to Jonestown after the tragedy, Guyana was just a backdrop.

Between 1945 and 2001, there was no greater U.S. disaster than Jonestown. On Nov. 18, 1978, 918 Americans, including over 300 children, died in the mass murder-suicide orchestrated by cult leader Jim Jones, a preacher turned revolutionary leader. After his followers murdered a U.S. congressman who had come to investigate human rights abuses at Jonestown, a paranoid Jones believed the end was nigh, and he pushed his commune to drink cyanide-laced fruit punch, some voluntarily, some at gunpoint. For weeks, the story dominated front pages in the United States. Even today, Kool-Aid, the flavored drink powder, carries dark associations—even though the actual poisoned drink was a lesser-known brand, Flavor Aid.

Journey to Nowhere: A New World Tragedy, Shiva Naipaul, Outsider Editions, 432 pp., $22, July 2026

But this very American story took place outside U.S. borders, in the tiny South American country of Guyana. Jones’s cult, the Peoples Temple, had decamped there to found its own colony, with approval from the Guyanese government, after increasing scrutiny over the Temple’s practices and finances in the United States. For most of the reporters and authors who flocked to Jonestown after the tragedy, Guyana was just a backdrop.

Trinidadian British writer Shiva Naipaul’s book, Journey to Nowhere, originally published in 1980, tries to put Guyana back into the Jonestown story. The book’s original U.K. title, Black & White, was more apposite: This is a story very much about race, racial politics, and division. Naipaul wrote not only of the divisions inside Guyanese society, but about the often-overlooked racial politics of the Peoples Temple itself, where a white one-time civil rights preacher initiated the mass killing of a largely Black congregation.

Jonestown is well-trodden ground for authors, but Naipaul’s book is being released as part of a new series from Doubleday, Outsider Editions, which focuses on “overlooked” books “outside the traditional canon.” The press release for this edition of Journey to Nowhere calls the book a “masterpiece of........

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