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.
Arvustused
Thubron returns with what might be his masterpiece Thubrons prose shines a penetrating light on the nature of memory and being human. Sublime. -- Simon Humphreys * Mail on Sunday * Intensely moving -- Tim Martin * Sunday Telegraph * An engrossing, unsettling and brutally beautiful masterpiece. -- John Harding * Daily Mail * Each life storyis told with all this writers irresistible narrative gift -- Ursula K. Le Guin * Guardian * Medicine owes an equal debt of gratitude to him for evoking a journey through the brain with the same adventurous and beguiled spirit as he might a rainforest or ancient city With the ease of a master craftsman he makes up new wordslovingly evokes the extraordinary places he has passed through This outstanding novel confirms that there is nowhere Thubron fears to tread. -- Melissa Katsoulis * The Times * His calm, contemplative tone and his mastery of imageryare on full display here. -- Edmund Gordon * Sunday Times * The novel impresses with its literary craft and ambition. -- Ian Thomson * Evening Standard * A deeply personal, characteristically ambitious book. -- John Preston * Daily Telegraph * A compelling, lyrical tale of how a single spark unravels seven entwined lives. -- Hannah Shaddock * Radio Times * Thubron has written a novel which is at once disturbing and consoling. It makes you both think and feel at the same time, which is perhaps what the best fiction does more surely than any other art form. -- Allan Massie * Spectator *
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The breathtaking, emotionally wrenching new novel from the award-winning novelist and travel writer, Colin Thubron
Colin Thubron is an acknowledged master of travel writing, and the winner of many prizes and awards. His first writing was about the Middle East - Damascus, Lebanon and Cyprus. In 1982 he travelled into the Soviet Union in an ancient Morris Marina, pursued by the KGB, a journey he recorded in Among the Russians. From these early experiences developed his 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. His most recent book is To a Mountain in Tibet (all available in Vintage). Colin Thubron was President of the Royal Society of Literature from 2010 to 2017.
