The Book of Fire by Christy Lefteri
Published by Ballantine Books
Publication date: August 17, 2023
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A forest fire, set by a developer to clear land for a hotel, ends up decimating a small Greek village, leaving the remaining residents awash in the ashes of loss and grief in The Book of Fire. For Irini, Tasso, and their young daughter, Chara, the pain is even greater as it comes with the loss of a loved one and Tasso’s career as an artist. With consummate grace, author Christy Lefteri chronicles their lives, the implications of the fire, and the damage left behind.
In their effort to escape, Tasso forced Irini and Chara to leave him behind while he stayed to help others. He survives, but his hands are severely burned and the loss of the forest, his inspiration, leaves him a mute shell who sits in their backyard day after day. There’s only Irini to reconstruct normalcy for their daughter, leaving her grappling with sympathy and frustration for her husband.
This intimate foray into the manifestations of guilt and grief is heightened when Irini, out on a walk, comes upon the developer sitting against one of the remaining trees near the area he set fire to. Her anger is such that while she knows him to be in distress, she walks away. This decision and the actions that follow open The Book of Fire’s doors to the larger issues of culpability and retribution.
This is less of a mystery and more of an exploration of the myriad of emotions unleashed when tragedy strikes an entire community. Lefteri probes the shifts in dynamics between an array of relationships with a delicacy that opens the mind to unexpected perspectives. It’s a quiet, but intriguing journey, with the exception of one of Irini’s decisions that I simply could not reconcile for myself. It was a critical enough component of The Book of Fire that it impacted my overall appreciation of the novel.
Where The Book of Fire shone is in how, in a story about the survivors of a tragedy looking for answers and vengeance to assuage their grief, Lefteri is able to elicit a larger and equally important realization from her characters by the novel’s end. There were clearly people at fault for the fire, but was anyone truly innocent? None of them had adapted to the changes in their environment, ignoring increasing drought, and foregoing maintenance of the forest. In no way does she absolve the developer, but in this charred landscape she plants the seeds of accountability and in doing so lifts The Book of Fire from an isolated tragedy to a global concern.
Lefteri eloquently explores the balance between man and nature in Cyprus in her previous novel, Songbirds.
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*I received a free copy of this book from Ballantine Books in exchange for an honest review.*
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