Night of Fire - Hardcover

Thubron, Colin

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0701183810 ISBN 13: 9780701183813

Publisher: Chatto & Windus, 2016

Synopsis

A house is burning. Its six tenants include a failed priest, a naturalist, a neurosurgeon and an invalid dreaming of his anxious boyhood. Their landlord’s relationship to them is both intimate and shadowy. At times he shares their preoccupations and memories. He will share their fate.

In Fire, the passions and obsessions in a dying house loom and shift, from the hallucinating drug addict in the basement to the landlord training his telescope on the night skies. The tenants’ stories range through an African refugee camp, Greek Orthodox monasteries and the cremation grounds of India, and haunting the edges of these lives are memories. Will these memories be consumed for ever by the flames? Or can memories survive in some form?

Fire is Colin Thubron’s fictive masterpiece: a novel of exquisite beauty and lingering mystery.

About this title

From the Back Cover

A house is burning, threatening the existence of its six tenants—including a failed priest, a naturalist, a neurosurgeon, an invalid dreaming of his anxious boyhood, a photographer, and a traveler—and their landlord, whose relationship to the tenants is both intimate and shadowy. At times, he shares their preoccupations and memories. He will also share their fate.

In Night of Fire, the passions and obsessions in a dying house loom and shift, from those of the hallucinating drug addict in the basement to the landlord training his rooftop telescope on the night skies. As the novel progresses, the tenants’ diverse stories take us through an African refugee camp, Greek Orthodox monasteries, and the cremation grounds of India. Haunting the edges of their lives are memories. Will these remembrances be consumed forever by the flames? Or can they survive in some form?

About the Author

Colin Thubron is an acknowledged master of travel writing, and the author of six award-winning novels. He has been numbered among 'the current masters of the short novel' (TLS), and called 'one of our most compelling contemporary novelists' (Independent), as well as writing the classic travel books, Behind the Wall (winner of the Hawthornden Prize and the Thomas Cook Travel Award), The Lost Heart of Asia, In Siberia (Prix Bouvier) and Shadow of the Silk Road (all available in Vintage). In 2010, Colin Thubron became President of the Royal Society of Literature.
Fire is his seventh novel.

Edition details

• Publisher: Chatto & Windus
• Publication date: 2016
• ISBN 10: 0701183810
• ISBN 13: 9780701183813
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 384