Incendiary

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"Dear Osama," a woman writes, "you blew up my husband and boy." With stark simplicity, these words begin a story that's as unsettling as it is compelling. After a suicide bomb at a London soccer match, a young wife and mother is forced to confront the unthinkable. In a voice filled with despair, this unnamed narrator begins a letter to Osama bin Laden. She writes so he will "see what a human boy really is from the shape of the hole he leaves behind."



With her familiar life blown to pieces, the letter is a cri de coeur and an attempt to convince Osama to stop his campaign of terror. But this is only the beginning. With London under a virtual lockdown and every scrap of life she knew gone in one terrible moment, she talks her way into a job aiding the police in their investigation. Befriended by a journalist and his girlfriend, she is drawn into a psychological tangle of subterfuge that threatens her sanity and her life. And when London faces yet another attack, she finds herself under siege, on the run, and witness to a desperation and violence she could never have fathomed.

Undeniably provocative and stunningly bold, with a vision as macabre as it is chillingly realistic, Incendiary is a keenly imaginative first novel, lit by the times we know.
(Fall 2005 Selection)