Incendiary
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4.4 • 5 Ratings
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER
Winner of the Somerset Maugham Award, the Prix Spécial du Jury, and Book of the Month Club’s First Fiction Award · Finalist for the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize Best First Book Award · Named a Best Book of the Year by The Washington Post and The Economist
Now a film starring Michelle Williams, Ewan Macgregor, and Matthew Macfayden!
“Sensitive, artful, and deft . . . near-perfect debut.” —Baltimore Sun
A distraught woman writes a letter to one of history’s most notorious criminals after her young son and her husband are killed in a bomb attack at a soccer match in London. In an emotionally raw voice alive with grief, compassion, and startling humor, she tries to convince him to abandon his terror campaign by revealing to him the desperate sadness—“I am a woman built on the wreckage of myself”—and the broken heart of a working-class life blown apart.
A surreal vision made brilliantly, viscerally powerful and undeniable, Incendiary is a “a mesmerizing tour de force” (The Washington Post).
“Read Incendiary. . . . It is outrageous, infuriating, heartbreaking, terrifying and very, very important.” —NOW Magazine
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
An al-Qaeda bomb attack on a London soccer match provides the tragicomic donn e of former Daily Telegraph journalist Cleave's impressive multilayered debut: a novel-length letter from an enraged mother to Osama bin Laden. Living hand to mouth in London's East End, the unnamed mother's life is shattered when her policeman husband (part of a bomb disposal unit) and four-year-old son are killed in the stadium stands. Complicating matters: our narrator witnesses the event on TV, while in the throes of passion with her lover, journalist Jasper Black. The full story of that day comes out piecemeal, among rants and ruminations, complete with the widow's shell-shocked sifting of the stadium's human carnage. London goes on high terror alert; the narrator downs Valium and gin and clutches her son's stuffed rabbit. After a suicide attempt, she finds solace with married police superintendent Terrence Butcher and in volunteer work. When the bomb scares escalate, actions by Jasper and his girlfriend Petra become the widow's undoing. The whole is nicely done, as the protagonist's headlong sentences mimic intelligent illiteracy with accuracy, and her despairingly acidic responses to events and media versions of them ring true. But the working-class London slang permeates the book to a distracting degree.
