Colin Thubron. (2017). Night of Fire: A Novel. HarperCollins.

Colin Thubron. 2017. Night of Fire: A Novel. HarperCollins.

Colin Thubron, Night of Fire: A Novel. HarperCollins, 2017.

Colin Thubron. Night of Fire: A Novel. HarperCollins, 2017.

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     Colin Thubron is an acclaimed travel writer and novelist. His first books were about the Middle East – Damascus, Lebanon and Cyprus. In 1982 he travelled by car into the Soviet Union, a journey he described in Among the Russians. From these early experiences developed his classic travel books: Behind the Wall: A Journey through China (winner of the Hawthornden Prize and the Thomas Cook Travel Award), The Lost Heart of Asia, In Siberia (Prix Bouvier), Shadow of the Silk Road and To a Mountain in Tibet.

     
     

     Among other honors, Colin Thubron has received the Ness award of the Royal Geographical Society and the Livingstone Memorial Medal of the Royal Society for Asian Affairs. In 2007 he was made CBE. He was elected President of the Royal Society of Literature from 2010 to 2017, and named an RSL Companion of Literature in 2020.

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Night of Fire

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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; 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.

reviews

1. • premium: False
   • source: Booklist (starred review)
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     "A vivid and wistful meditation on the mysteries of diverse lands, personality, and memory...Thubron is remarkable for his supple, nuanced prose and concentration on individual personalities as well as place. This evocative and philosophical novel reminds us that such qualities make for powerful fiction as well." — Booklist (starred review)

     "Each seemingly separate chapter is a gem-perspectives on life and death, love and loss, time and truth, and God...so elegant and poetic that if I could read just one book this year, I would absolutely pick this one." — BookBrowse

     "Gradually the stories interweave in a way that is both mysterious and mystical, until in the end we are left in a kind of dream world....Veteran travel author and novelist Colin Thubron has produced an engrossing, unsettling and brutally beautiful masterpiece." — Daily Mail (London)

     "He combines curiosity with erudition, and stylishness with gravitas.... The novel slowly builds into a haunting study of memory, identity and loss.... His calm, contemplative tone and his mastery of imagery are on full display here." — Sunday Times (London)

     "A work of art that is as thrilling as it is profound...a masterpiece." — New York Review of Books

     "Night of Fire may be the hottest novel of the year, but the real heat is generated by Thubron's gorgeous prose and his reflections on the persistence of memory...A profound and exquisite novel." — Ron Charles, Washington Post

     "An engrossing novel by the celebrated travel writer...Thubron intrigues with his many resonances and takes the reader on a journey through life's essential questions." — Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

     "Thubron is one of our greatest living travel writers...his observations are sharp and betray his deep sense of curiosity, and he fashions his many fascinations into prose that reads like poetry." — Outside magazine

     "Remarkable...luminous." — Publishers Weekly

     "A compelling, lyrical tale of how a single spark unravels seven entwined lives." — Radio Times

     "In his first novel for 14 years, Thubron returns with what might be his masterpiece.... Thubron's prose shines a penetrating light on the nature of memory and being human. Sublime." — Mail on Sunday (London)

     "[Thubron's] novels and classic travelogues do not seem to spring from disparate parts of the imagination, but rather enjoy a symbiotic relationship that, as he matures, results in increasingly fascinating work.... This outstanding novel confirms that there is nowhere Thubron fears to tread." — The Spectator

     "Each life story, or a significant scene or event from each, is told with all this writer's irresistible narrative gift. The novel displays the sensitive curiosity about other lives, and keen observation of how people differ, that distinguishes his travel writing...complex and skilful, yet transparent, without trickery." — Ursula Le Guin, The Guardian

     "Thubron's prose is, of course, finely crafted. He veers in style between lyrical heights...NIGHT OF FIRE could best be described as a poetic and erudite meditation on the journey of life." — Literary Review

     "Thubron pushes gently at great mysteries.... the idea of a catastrophe at the centre of a web of lives recalls Thornton Wilder's The Bridge of San Luis Rey; the occult connections between characters across time feels...

2. • premium: True
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     October 24, 2016
     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.”

3. • premium: True
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     Starred review from November 1, 2016
     Flashbacks provide a glimpse of the lives of seven seemingly disconnected people who occupy an old British building in this engrossing novel by the celebrated travel writer.Faulty wiring sparks a fire one night in the basement of the building, and as it moves from flat to flat, Thubron (To a Mountain in Tibet, 2011, etc.) visits each tenant in six long chapters, all bracketed by two short ones on the landlord. "Priest" features a cleric named Stephen as a photograph sends his memory back 50 years through a variety of religious experiences, from the seminary to the asceticism of a Mount Athos monastery and missionary work in Tanzania. Memory is both physical and personal in the "Neurosurgeon" section, which alternates between the doctor on a hike deciding whether to propose to his companion and contemplating operations where patients may lose more than excised tissue. In the "Naturalist" section, the title character is Stephanie, the frequent subject is butterflies--sometimes thought to be "spirits of the departed"--and the book's high point of sensuality is her making love with a woman named Samantha. The "Photographer" is Steve, who tries to reach his dead mother through a seance. The "Schoolboy" lies to gain sympathy by saying his parents are dead. And then comes the "Traveller," named Steven, who has been roaming for 50 years. He has recently had brain surgery. He visits a Tibetan monastery in Varanasi, where the dead are burned in public. The book by this point is bursting not just with variations of Stephen, but with nearby death, which all the building's dwellers may be facing on the night of fire they unavoidably share, as the traveler unites them in mirroring many details of their stories--a pilgrim not unlike the author, who is 77 and can look back at 50 years of travel and fiction writing. Thubron isn't subtle in his themes or structure, but he intrigues with his many resonances and takes the reader on a journey through life's essential questions.

     COPYRIGHT(2016) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

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     Starred review from November 15, 2016
     A burning building and the final thoughts of its seven occupants prompt a vivid and wistful meditation on the mysteries of diverse lands, personality, and memory. A priest, haunted by a colleague's suicide, seeks solace in Africa. A naturalist discovers her own wings while studying butterflies in Normandy. A traveler, hollowed out by his mother's death, visits the Ganges. A neurosurgeon traverses his patients' scarred brains. Certain images recur throughout the novel, as do uncanny parallels in the characters' names, family relationships, and lingering questions about the fragility of the coherent self. And as the book progresses, it becomes clear that Thubron's intent is not just a cycle of stories linked by tragic fate but something messier and more profound. If one's life is a burning house, as declared by a Tibetan monk near the book's end, presumably to nail down the allegory, is it possible that one life can contain multiple histories, each presenting its own truth? As a master travel writer, Thubron (To a Mountain in Tibet, 2011) is remarkable for his supple, nuanced prose and concentration on individual personalities as well as place. This evocative and philosophical novel reminds us that such qualities make for powerful fiction as well.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)

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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; 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...

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