Night of Fire
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- £6.99
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- £6.99
Publisher Description
It began with a spark...
A house is burning. Its six tenants include a failed priest, a naturalist, a neurosurgeon and a photographer. Their landlord's relationship to them is both intimate and shadowy. At times he shares their obsessions and memories. He will also share their fate.
The passions of these individuals reach beyond the dying house that holds them. One recalls a lonely childhood, another the cremation grounds of India, another an African refugee camp. But will their stories be consumed forever by the flames?
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A Victorian house somewhere near the sea, ruined over time, is burning down. Chapter by chapter, room by smoky room, Thubron's remarkable novel journeys into the lives of the house's six occupants, mining their pasts and the places they've traveled for answers to questions that have plagued mankind since Socrates. What is memory? Does it constitute one's very self, or conquer death as something inherited, like a story? Looking through his telescope for wisdom, the landlord muses on the vastness of the stars. The priest, who no longer believes, relives a tragedy resulting from faith's melancholy absence. The neurosurgeon, a coldhearted rationalist, is confronted by a patient who pleads with him not to erase her memories of a dead lover when extracting a tumor from her brain. The young naturalist, in love with butterflies, finds the infinite under a microscope. And the photographer searches for life's essence in the portraits he takes. By the time we arrive at the luminous chapter devoted to the traveler, it is clear these restless tenants have more in common than we first imagined. All of them recognize, as the traveler does, that "an obscure rankling never quite died as if there had, after all, been a destination that had eluded him."
