Award-winning, bestselling novelist and travel writer Colin Thubron
returns to fiction with his first novel in more than a decade, a
searing, poetic masterwork of memory.
A house is burning, threatening the existence of its six
tenants--including a failed priest, a naturalist, a neurosurgeon, and an
invalid dreaming of his anxious boyhood--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?
Night of Fire is Colin Thubron's fictive masterpiece: a novel of
exquisite beauty, philosophical depth, and lingering mystery that is a
brilliant meditation on life itself.
