This review is written with thanks to Pigeonhole for the opportunity to read and review The Book Of Fire.

Blurb:

This morning, I met the man who started the fire. He did something terrible, but then, so have I. I left him. I left him and now he may be dead.

Once upon a time there was a beautiful village that held a million stories of love and loss and peace and war, and it was swallowed up by a fire that blazed up to the sky. The fire ran all the way down to the sea where it met with its reflection.

A family from two nations, England and Greece, live a simple life in a tiny Greek village: Irini, Tasso and their daughter, lovely, sweet Chara, whose name means joy. Their life goes up in flames in a single day when one man starts a fire out of greed and indifference. Many are killed, homes are destroyed, and the region’s natural beauty wiped out.

In the wake of the fire, Chara bears deep scars across her back and arms. Tasso is frozen in trauma, devastated that he wasn’t there when his family most needed him. And Irini is crippled by guilt at her part in the fate of the man who started the fire.

But this family has survived, and slowly green shoots of hope and renewal will grow from the smouldering ruins of devastation.

Once again, Christy Lefteri has crafted a novel which is intimate and epic, sweeping and delicate. The Book of Fire explores not only the damage wrought by human folly, and the costs of survival in our changing world, but also – and ultimately – our powers of redemption and renewal.

Review:

I’ve read and loved both of Christy Lefteri’s previous books so I was really excited to have the opportunity to read The Book Of Fire and I think it is my favourite novel by the author so far. Her writing is absolutely beautiful: she describes the scenes (some of them quite harrowing) with an immaculate detail which creates a really strong emotional impact.

The Book Of Fire is written from two perspectives: firstly from the first person view of Irini and secondly from the third person viewpoint as she attempts to write her story. I felt this was a really inventive way of helping the reader to understand the mindset of the characters so we could try to understand the horror that Irini, her family and the community have been through. The sympathy I felt for them was really powerful and this made the novel quite difficult to read in places.

It is clear that Christy Lefteri has researched the themes in The Book Of Fire thoroughly and I appreciated the author’s note at the end of the book which discussed this in more detail. The novel felt incredibly relevant to current events around the world and this made it even more poignant.

The novel is something of a slow burn and although there are no particularly explosive moments, I found the story of Mr Monk intriguing and I was interested by the questions his story asked of us. The Book Of Fire has had a profound effect on me and I will be thinking about it for a long time to come.

The Book Of Fire is available from Amazon.