Incendiary
A Novel
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3.7 • 96 Ratings
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
From the New York Times bestselling author of Little Bee comes “a gripping story…and portrayal of a woman unraveling in the face of overwhelming grief” (The Boston Globe) a “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).
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.
