Night of Fire

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.