Incendiary

Local Description

2005. First edition, first printing. A near fine copy only marked by a small section of age tanning to the top edge of the text block.

Description

Angry, funny, controversial and unpredictable, Incendiary will be one of the most talked-about books of 2005. Not since Alex Garland's The Beach has a debut novel used such compulsive storytelling to convey a distopian vision of moral degradation. Not since Roddy Doyle's The Woman Who Walked Into Doors has a male writer created such a powerful female voice. From her first sentence, Cleave's narrator seduces the reader with her biting, deadpan wit, her no-nonsense attitude and her love for her son. Over the next 250 pages we must watch her suffer. Eleven suicide bombers turn the stadium into an inferno during an Arsenal-Chelsea match. Her husband and four-year-old son are blown to smithereens. She is left with an empty ex-Council flat in Bethnal Green and nothing to live for. And so she writes Osama Bin Laden a letter to tell him just what she thinks, a letter that takes the reader into a frightening maze of class-bound relationships - and right to the dark heart of a London under siege. A unique, twisted powerhouse of a novel, Incendiary has had readers staying up all night to finish it, then up half the next night arguing about it. Not since Martin Amis has a writer pinned a generation down on a mat like this and refused to allow it up till it admits it's rotten.

Awards

Winner of Somerset Maugham Award 2006.

Author description

Chris Cleave was born in London in 1973. He has a first from Balliol College, Oxford, in Experimental Psychology. After trying out various career paths, including sailing in the Mediterranean and bar work in Melbourne (where he broke the record for carrying greatest number of highball glasses lifted on a wire tray from the shoulder on to a straight arm - 88), he worked at the Daily Telegraph for three years, and then for Martha Lane Fox at lastminute.com. He left there in 2003 to concentrate on writing full time. He lives in Paris with his wife and son.