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Fires
"I really enjoyed this book" – S J Watson, author of Before I Go To Sleep
"I've read this and can confirm it's class." – Chris McQueer, author of Hings
“A compelling expedition into working-class and millennial disenfranchisement, Fires is as tender as it is combustive. Ward writes with the conviction of an angry mob and the heat of a Molotov cocktail.”
- Harry Gallon, author of Every Fox Is A Rabid Fox
There's a fire on the horizon.
For Guy, a fireman, it means the death of his wife and daughter. For 19-year-old Nathan and Alexa, it means a chance to fight back against austerity and abandonment.
While the teenagers turn to arson, Guy searches for a meaning behind his family’s deaths, battling corruption and a lost underclass, intent on fiery revolution.
For all three, their actions will lead them to the precipice of disaster.
"I've read this and can confirm it's class." – Chris McQueer, author of Hings
“A compelling expedition into working-class and millennial disenfranchisement, Fires is as tender as it is combustive. Ward writes with the conviction of an angry mob and the heat of a Molotov cocktail.”
- Harry Gallon, author of Every Fox Is A Rabid Fox
There's a fire on the horizon.
For Guy, a fireman, it means the death of his wife and daughter. For 19-year-old Nathan and Alexa, it means a chance to fight back against austerity and abandonment.
While the teenagers turn to arson, Guy searches for a meaning behind his family’s deaths, battling corruption and a lost underclass, intent on fiery revolution.
For all three, their actions will lead them to the precipice of disaster.
263 pages, Kindle Edition
Published October 5, 2017
3 people want to read
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November 2, 2017
Find all my book reviews, plus fascinating author interviews, exclusive guest posts and book extracts, on my blog: https://whatcathyreadnext.wordpress.com/
From its dramatic and shocking first chapter, I was drawn into the story related in Fires, which is both thriller and exploration of the consequences of disaffection and social inequality.
The What Cathy Read Next intertextual radar is always on standby and the fact that the main character in Fires is called Guy and is a fireman naturally made me think of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 whose protagonist is Guy Montag. Indeed, in Fires, Guy’s wife, Eve, remarks “You reek of smoke…It’s coming from inside of you” echoing the scene in Fahrenheit 451 where Guy Montag is recognised because he smells of kerosene.
In Fahrenheit 451 the role of fireman is subverted to be a starter of fires not a quencher of them but its famous opening line “It was a pleasure to burn” very neatly sums up the excitement and feeling of power experienced by Nathan and his arsonist friends in Fires’ other story line. In every other respect, they are powerless. Unemployment, the threat of unemployment, poor housing and low wages has created disaffection and anger. For Nathan, fire is an obsession, a means to strike back and an energising force that contrasts with what he sees as his dead-end life.
‘Raging in its glory, the fire captivated him. Here was life, movement, a spark of energy rippling through the flat night air. Rubbing his thumb back and forth over the cold metal lighter, Nathan pictured the whole city burning, raised to the ground by an underclass of the discontented, waiting for a chance to take their lives into their own hands, dark figures rising in the night to mark their claim on the city.’
The industrial landscape described in the novel is clearly contemporary but at times has a post-apocalyptic feel to it with its abandoned community buildings, boarded up houses and deserted retail parks. I felt the author was particularly good at capturing the atmosphere of the rundown areas of the city.
‘The light in the greasy cafe on the edge of the estate was dim and every surface was sticky, retaining the memory of distant meals. The clientele was mainly old men in dark Harringtons and bomber jackets, sipping cups of tea as they stared out of dusty windows.’
‘The hotel stood alone and abandoned on the main road into the city…Its four stories of windows had once been boarded up but the rain had long since rotted the wood and now the windows stared out over the empty dual carriageway, awaiting guests that were never coming.’
Presiding over everything is the huge steelworks that is the main source of employment in the city.
‘As the first stars bloomed then faded in the approach of night, Nathan turned towards the steelworks with the black curve of the river behind it. He watched the chimneys belching balls of flame and the orange glare of the blast furnaces.’
In Fires, power and money corrupt and those who possess power will go to great lengths to protect it. It is down to individuals, like Guy, to stand up to them, to reveal the truth and mete out justice. Fires is both compelling thriller and powerful indictment of the consequences of disaffection and deprivation within our society.
From its dramatic and shocking first chapter, I was drawn into the story related in Fires, which is both thriller and exploration of the consequences of disaffection and social inequality.
The What Cathy Read Next intertextual radar is always on standby and the fact that the main character in Fires is called Guy and is a fireman naturally made me think of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 whose protagonist is Guy Montag. Indeed, in Fires, Guy’s wife, Eve, remarks “You reek of smoke…It’s coming from inside of you” echoing the scene in Fahrenheit 451 where Guy Montag is recognised because he smells of kerosene.
In Fahrenheit 451 the role of fireman is subverted to be a starter of fires not a quencher of them but its famous opening line “It was a pleasure to burn” very neatly sums up the excitement and feeling of power experienced by Nathan and his arsonist friends in Fires’ other story line. In every other respect, they are powerless. Unemployment, the threat of unemployment, poor housing and low wages has created disaffection and anger. For Nathan, fire is an obsession, a means to strike back and an energising force that contrasts with what he sees as his dead-end life.
‘Raging in its glory, the fire captivated him. Here was life, movement, a spark of energy rippling through the flat night air. Rubbing his thumb back and forth over the cold metal lighter, Nathan pictured the whole city burning, raised to the ground by an underclass of the discontented, waiting for a chance to take their lives into their own hands, dark figures rising in the night to mark their claim on the city.’
The industrial landscape described in the novel is clearly contemporary but at times has a post-apocalyptic feel to it with its abandoned community buildings, boarded up houses and deserted retail parks. I felt the author was particularly good at capturing the atmosphere of the rundown areas of the city.
‘The light in the greasy cafe on the edge of the estate was dim and every surface was sticky, retaining the memory of distant meals. The clientele was mainly old men in dark Harringtons and bomber jackets, sipping cups of tea as they stared out of dusty windows.’
‘The hotel stood alone and abandoned on the main road into the city…Its four stories of windows had once been boarded up but the rain had long since rotted the wood and now the windows stared out over the empty dual carriageway, awaiting guests that were never coming.’
Presiding over everything is the huge steelworks that is the main source of employment in the city.
‘As the first stars bloomed then faded in the approach of night, Nathan turned towards the steelworks with the black curve of the river behind it. He watched the chimneys belching balls of flame and the orange glare of the blast furnaces.’
In Fires, power and money corrupt and those who possess power will go to great lengths to protect it. It is down to individuals, like Guy, to stand up to them, to reveal the truth and mete out justice. Fires is both compelling thriller and powerful indictment of the consequences of disaffection and deprivation within our society.
November 8, 2017
*Disclaimer* I received a free copy of this ebook in exchange for an honest review.
2.5 stars
This is a story about murder, betrayal, and disaffected inner-city youth. It has all the components needed for an explosive novel. Fast paced, the pages come alive in your hands. However, far too many spelling issues and errors marred the enjoyment immensely for me. For example, we have the following sentence '... as Guy stared at towards the girl smoking her third cigarette.' and 'Eve crossed her arms crossed'. Not to mention 'taunt' instead of 'taut', 'alright' used alternately with 'all right' when all right is the correct usage, and 'imaging' instead of 'imagining'. Then we have head-hopping and filter words, etc.
I also read Dead Dogs and Splintered Hearts a while ago and liked that collection of short stories a lot, which led me to look forward to reading this full-length novel.
If you like a dark and tragic read, and can ignore the any typos/errors, then you are likely to love this book. The author shows great imagination and holds your attention.
2.5 stars
This is a story about murder, betrayal, and disaffected inner-city youth. It has all the components needed for an explosive novel. Fast paced, the pages come alive in your hands. However, far too many spelling issues and errors marred the enjoyment immensely for me. For example, we have the following sentence '... as Guy stared at towards the girl smoking her third cigarette.' and 'Eve crossed her arms crossed'. Not to mention 'taunt' instead of 'taut', 'alright' used alternately with 'all right' when all right is the correct usage, and 'imaging' instead of 'imagining'. Then we have head-hopping and filter words, etc.
I also read Dead Dogs and Splintered Hearts a while ago and liked that collection of short stories a lot, which led me to look forward to reading this full-length novel.
If you like a dark and tragic read, and can ignore the any typos/errors, then you are likely to love this book. The author shows great imagination and holds your attention.
February 26, 2018
Novel titles are seldom as apt as Tom Ward’s Fires, which follows Guy, a firefighter in a town dominated by its vast steelworks, and Nathan and his friends, teenage arsonists whose lives are otherwise foreclosed by poverty, corruption and ‘the system’. Guy and Nathan’s paths eventually cross in expected and unexpected ways – most of them fiery – in an intermittently compelling narrative suffused with anger and loss.
The unnamed town in Fires is decaying due to neglect and poverty. The rich live in gated communities above the urban sprawl that is filled with abandoned civic buildings and row upon row of boarded houses. Increasingly vociferous and angry protestors march through the streets: there are shady goings-on at the steelworks, and jobs are dwindling. People are frightened. Lives and livelihoods are at risk.
This non-specific scenario is oddly timeless – deliberately so, I believe. In the context of the UK, a town wholly dependent on the production of steel harks back many decades, before the domination of China and elsewhere. Yet the gated communities, vacant tower blocks and fast-food outlets described in Fires sound contemporary. There is little sense of a surrounding nation, and the anonymous town is a self-contained entity that exists in a vacuum suggestive of wider catastrophe: one pictures everywhere else as cloaked in impenetrable night.
There are comparatively few novels devoted to firefighters, so it is interesting that Fires should resonate so strongly with Henry Green’s Caught (1943), which is also an urban tale, this time of the Auxiliary Fire Service during the London Blitz. Caught is similarly pared down: its principal characters are sparely named Pye and Roe (PyeRoemania?), and its narrative trajectory is as grimly inevitable as Fires. The writing style of Caught is extremely odd: error-strewn and infelicitous sentences that cumulatively become incantatory, hieratic. As one perceptive reader–reviewer has said of Caught, it’s not an enjoyable read, but it feels like a necessary one. He or she might have much the same feeling about Fires.
Stories echo forward and back, and fire itself is a potent and ambiguous cultural metaphor: a warm and caring friend when safely contained; a devil of destruction and pain when it escapes our control. Whether ignited or fought, fires rage through Fires, consuming property, lives and possibilities. For Guy, dedication to fighting fire has consumed his life; for Nathan and his gang, arson provides a power and freedom, a terrible beauty, rarely experienced in their world of dead-end jobs and dreary routine.
Coincidentally, it’s here that another Green(e) is evoked, for Fires conjures a close cousin to Greeneland, populated by isolated individuals contemplating their past with regret and their future with paralysis. Guy’s feelings of guilt are like those of Rowe (another one) in The Ministry of Fear (1943, again). In addition, the urge to destroy that propels Nathan and his gang is shared by the children in Greene’s short story The Destructors (1954).
Fires is less successful when considered in isolation from its illustrious forebears. In my opinion, it is too long, so that the story seems slackly spun out. And there are just too many fires: by the time I'd reached the sixth or seventh descriptive passage about explosions of flame and falling masonry, it was difficult to feel involved. With some judicious pruning and an injection of momentum, the novel would have felt much more urgent. Alternatively, if conversations and/or contemplations had been more creative and provocative, the novel would have filled the space available. As it is, the plot outcomes are unexpected but unsurprising. The prose tends to be flat and hurried, with an irritatingly absent comma before the coordinating conjunction then, plus other minor errors.
Despite these problems, much of the novel is strangely compelling. I read it quickly because I was caught up in the ambiguities of time, place and meaning, its principal achievements.
The unnamed town in Fires is decaying due to neglect and poverty. The rich live in gated communities above the urban sprawl that is filled with abandoned civic buildings and row upon row of boarded houses. Increasingly vociferous and angry protestors march through the streets: there are shady goings-on at the steelworks, and jobs are dwindling. People are frightened. Lives and livelihoods are at risk.
This non-specific scenario is oddly timeless – deliberately so, I believe. In the context of the UK, a town wholly dependent on the production of steel harks back many decades, before the domination of China and elsewhere. Yet the gated communities, vacant tower blocks and fast-food outlets described in Fires sound contemporary. There is little sense of a surrounding nation, and the anonymous town is a self-contained entity that exists in a vacuum suggestive of wider catastrophe: one pictures everywhere else as cloaked in impenetrable night.
There are comparatively few novels devoted to firefighters, so it is interesting that Fires should resonate so strongly with Henry Green’s Caught (1943), which is also an urban tale, this time of the Auxiliary Fire Service during the London Blitz. Caught is similarly pared down: its principal characters are sparely named Pye and Roe (PyeRoemania?), and its narrative trajectory is as grimly inevitable as Fires. The writing style of Caught is extremely odd: error-strewn and infelicitous sentences that cumulatively become incantatory, hieratic. As one perceptive reader–reviewer has said of Caught, it’s not an enjoyable read, but it feels like a necessary one. He or she might have much the same feeling about Fires.
Stories echo forward and back, and fire itself is a potent and ambiguous cultural metaphor: a warm and caring friend when safely contained; a devil of destruction and pain when it escapes our control. Whether ignited or fought, fires rage through Fires, consuming property, lives and possibilities. For Guy, dedication to fighting fire has consumed his life; for Nathan and his gang, arson provides a power and freedom, a terrible beauty, rarely experienced in their world of dead-end jobs and dreary routine.
Coincidentally, it’s here that another Green(e) is evoked, for Fires conjures a close cousin to Greeneland, populated by isolated individuals contemplating their past with regret and their future with paralysis. Guy’s feelings of guilt are like those of Rowe (another one) in The Ministry of Fear (1943, again). In addition, the urge to destroy that propels Nathan and his gang is shared by the children in Greene’s short story The Destructors (1954).
Fires is less successful when considered in isolation from its illustrious forebears. In my opinion, it is too long, so that the story seems slackly spun out. And there are just too many fires: by the time I'd reached the sixth or seventh descriptive passage about explosions of flame and falling masonry, it was difficult to feel involved. With some judicious pruning and an injection of momentum, the novel would have felt much more urgent. Alternatively, if conversations and/or contemplations had been more creative and provocative, the novel would have filled the space available. As it is, the plot outcomes are unexpected but unsurprising. The prose tends to be flat and hurried, with an irritatingly absent comma before the coordinating conjunction then, plus other minor errors.
Despite these problems, much of the novel is strangely compelling. I read it quickly because I was caught up in the ambiguities of time, place and meaning, its principal achievements.
October 30, 2017
This thriller is quite dark but kept me interested and is very relatable. It is set in modern times in a bleak, industrial city where the lives of two strangers, Guy and Nathan, become inextricably linked as Guy fights fires and arsonist Nathan likes to set them.
The book opens with a harrowing accident, where firefighter Guy has to attend to a raging blaze at his own home, dashing up to his first floor flat to save his wife and young daughter only to find he is too late. Suffering severe injuries, Guy awakens in the hospital to discover his loved ones’ funerals have been and gone, and he didn’t even get an invite. Suspicious, Guy recalls exactly what he saw of the two bodies at his home and starts to delve deeper into his wife and daughter’s deaths. He soon realises there’s some major foul play going on, and is hellbent on discovering who is to blame – and why. And then to wreak some fiery revenge.
Nineteen-year-old Nathan is disillusioned with life. He hates his low paid, low skilled job and is miserable with his girlfriend. On a drunken night out with his friends he gets in a fight to ‘protect’ a woman (who is more than capable of looking after herself) and becomes infatuated with her. The woman, Alexa, is similar in age to him and they share a love of arson. Combining Nathan’s mates and Alexa’s friend, they form a gang of firestarters who torch old, empty buildings around the city as well as Alexa’s old workplace, and then Nathan’s and then one of the gang’s workplaces… they are big on fires!
Guy, playing investigator to his family’s mysterious deaths believes at first that it’s Nathan and his gang who started the fire at his flat… but soon he learns, with the help of a newspaper reporter, that the local steelworks boss might have something to do with it – and other people even closer to Guy.
I really enjoyed this book, the story is set against a backdrop of a depressed, poverty stricken city where most of the inhabitants are just about getting by. This is contrasted with the wealthy corporate bigwigs who live in the nice part of town and are fixated with greed and material things. The steelworks boss is in the process of making workers redundant and, as the major employer of the town, there are lots of protests and riots, which our bunch of arsonists take advantage of to set stuff alight.
To me there seemed to be a subtle comment on class divide, a capitalist system that’s failing everyone apart from the few top dogs, and the desperate things some people will do for money to supplement their shite, unliveable wages. Nathan and Alexa just want to burn the city down, so that they can all start again. They are miserable in their mundane lives and gloomy city with empty buildings and no jobs. Even fireman Guy has zero trust in the police, and doesn’t go to them with his suspicions on the death of his family, preferring to take matters into his own hands.
All in all, a good, well-paced, thoughtful read!
I received a free review copy from the author. This review and more on my blog www.rosalynkelly.co.uk/blog
The book opens with a harrowing accident, where firefighter Guy has to attend to a raging blaze at his own home, dashing up to his first floor flat to save his wife and young daughter only to find he is too late. Suffering severe injuries, Guy awakens in the hospital to discover his loved ones’ funerals have been and gone, and he didn’t even get an invite. Suspicious, Guy recalls exactly what he saw of the two bodies at his home and starts to delve deeper into his wife and daughter’s deaths. He soon realises there’s some major foul play going on, and is hellbent on discovering who is to blame – and why. And then to wreak some fiery revenge.
Nineteen-year-old Nathan is disillusioned with life. He hates his low paid, low skilled job and is miserable with his girlfriend. On a drunken night out with his friends he gets in a fight to ‘protect’ a woman (who is more than capable of looking after herself) and becomes infatuated with her. The woman, Alexa, is similar in age to him and they share a love of arson. Combining Nathan’s mates and Alexa’s friend, they form a gang of firestarters who torch old, empty buildings around the city as well as Alexa’s old workplace, and then Nathan’s and then one of the gang’s workplaces… they are big on fires!
Guy, playing investigator to his family’s mysterious deaths believes at first that it’s Nathan and his gang who started the fire at his flat… but soon he learns, with the help of a newspaper reporter, that the local steelworks boss might have something to do with it – and other people even closer to Guy.
I really enjoyed this book, the story is set against a backdrop of a depressed, poverty stricken city where most of the inhabitants are just about getting by. This is contrasted with the wealthy corporate bigwigs who live in the nice part of town and are fixated with greed and material things. The steelworks boss is in the process of making workers redundant and, as the major employer of the town, there are lots of protests and riots, which our bunch of arsonists take advantage of to set stuff alight.
To me there seemed to be a subtle comment on class divide, a capitalist system that’s failing everyone apart from the few top dogs, and the desperate things some people will do for money to supplement their shite, unliveable wages. Nathan and Alexa just want to burn the city down, so that they can all start again. They are miserable in their mundane lives and gloomy city with empty buildings and no jobs. Even fireman Guy has zero trust in the police, and doesn’t go to them with his suspicions on the death of his family, preferring to take matters into his own hands.
All in all, a good, well-paced, thoughtful read!
I received a free review copy from the author. This review and more on my blog www.rosalynkelly.co.uk/blog
February 7, 2018
“Nathan scanned the dark shapes of houses in the distance. A blur of yellow and red flickered far away, a rough shape somehow high above the lights of the city, as though a patch of night had been scratched away, revealing the flames beneath. He felt the warm shape of Alexa’s body against him. Side by side, the four of them watched in silence as the fire signaled to them from across the city.” – Fires by Tom Ward
(I received a copy from the author in exchange for an honest review.)
Guy, a middle-aged fireman, loses his family in a tragic accident… Or so it seems. As he sets out to uncover the truth about the blaze that changed his life forever, a small gang of disgruntled teenagers experiment with a dangerous new hobby involving vacant buildings, matches and a lighter fluid. While the young arsonists evade the authorities, Guy keeps digging for answers – and in doing so, slowly makes peace with his traumatizing past.
This is such an intriguing novel! Although primarily a thriller, there were plenty of mystery elements and some thought-provoking political undertones as well. The first chapter really grabbed my attention right away. The characters in this story are dynamic and complex, yet I easily related to them. I found their strengths and weaknesses to be beautifully balanced. Alexa and Nathan both share similarities, one being their obsession to fire, yet they can be so different at the same time, making it all the more interesting. I will warn readers that some parts of this book were a little bit hard to read in the sense they were tragic and full of raw emotions.
All in all, I recommend this dark and stirring novel to readers who like to be kept at the edge of their seats!
I give this book a rating of 4 out of 5 stars.
(I received a copy from the author in exchange for an honest review.)
Guy, a middle-aged fireman, loses his family in a tragic accident… Or so it seems. As he sets out to uncover the truth about the blaze that changed his life forever, a small gang of disgruntled teenagers experiment with a dangerous new hobby involving vacant buildings, matches and a lighter fluid. While the young arsonists evade the authorities, Guy keeps digging for answers – and in doing so, slowly makes peace with his traumatizing past.
This is such an intriguing novel! Although primarily a thriller, there were plenty of mystery elements and some thought-provoking political undertones as well. The first chapter really grabbed my attention right away. The characters in this story are dynamic and complex, yet I easily related to them. I found their strengths and weaknesses to be beautifully balanced. Alexa and Nathan both share similarities, one being their obsession to fire, yet they can be so different at the same time, making it all the more interesting. I will warn readers that some parts of this book were a little bit hard to read in the sense they were tragic and full of raw emotions.
All in all, I recommend this dark and stirring novel to readers who like to be kept at the edge of their seats!
I give this book a rating of 4 out of 5 stars.
October 19, 2017
This thriller, set in a steel city in the UK, treats fire almost as one of its characters. After the opening, in which we meet the main protagonist, a fireman, we are plunged into a world of burning, where the fire officer arrives at his next conflagration only to discover it’s his own home. He enters to rescue his family and finds his wife and toddler daughter murdered in the master bedroom of the apartment. From this point, the story develops into a mystery as our hero seeks the monster who has killed his loved ones.
The investigation is compromised by the introduction of a group of dissatisfied teenagers intent on destroying old, disused buildings in the city by burning them as a protest against the neglect of their community. Increasingly violent demonstrations featuring the steelworkers protesting against potential redundancy at their works create further complications.
Characters are well drawn, with real, three-dimensional people acting as the reader would expect in the various situations they find themselves. Villains are shown as humans with flaws: some more flawed than others, it must be said.
As the mystery is slowly revealed, layer by layer, the reader discovers some of the players are not what they seemed initially.
The denouement is as satisfying as it is inevitable, given all the ingredients in this well told story peopled by well-rounded characters.
Not a tale to read before bed, or if phobic about fire, this is an engaging, compelling, if distressing, novel.
The investigation is compromised by the introduction of a group of dissatisfied teenagers intent on destroying old, disused buildings in the city by burning them as a protest against the neglect of their community. Increasingly violent demonstrations featuring the steelworkers protesting against potential redundancy at their works create further complications.
Characters are well drawn, with real, three-dimensional people acting as the reader would expect in the various situations they find themselves. Villains are shown as humans with flaws: some more flawed than others, it must be said.
As the mystery is slowly revealed, layer by layer, the reader discovers some of the players are not what they seemed initially.
The denouement is as satisfying as it is inevitable, given all the ingredients in this well told story peopled by well-rounded characters.
Not a tale to read before bed, or if phobic about fire, this is an engaging, compelling, if distressing, novel.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews