Night of Fire

An old house is burning while its inhabitants sleep. As the fire advances, the novel enters the separate lives of the people inside: among them a failed priest, a naturalist, a neurosurgeon and a photographer, together with the landlord whose past is bound to the building. Each has carried private failures, obsessions and memories into the rooms that may become their last refuge.

The approaching disaster links stories that initially seem self-contained. Scientific curiosity, religious doubt, erotic attachment, grief and recollections of distant journeys are set against the physical destruction of the house, asking what gives a life coherence when possessions and certainty fall away. The novel’s structure turns a single night into a series of interior journeys whose connections become clearer as the flames close in.