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Incendiary: A Novel
Incendiary: A Novel
Incendiary: A Novel
Audiobook6 hours

Incendiary: A Novel

Written by Chris Cleave

Narrated by Tracy-Ann Oberman

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

4/5

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About this audiobook

Chris Cleave’s debut novel Incendiary—winner of the Book-of-the-Month Club’s First Fiction Award and the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize—is sure to captivate the same people who made Little Bee one of the most talked-about novels of the last decade.

I am a woman built upon the wreckage of myself.

In an emotionally raw voice alive with grief, compassion, and startling humor, a woman mourns the loss of her husband and son at the hands of one of history’s most notorious criminals. And in appealing to their executioner, she reveals the desperate sadness of a broken heart and a working-class life blown apart.
LanguageEnglish
Release dateJun 5, 2012
ISBN9781442354241
Author

Chris Cleave

Chris Cleave is the author of Everyone Brave is Forgiven, Gold, Incendiary, and the #1 New York Times bestseller Little Bee. He lives with his wife and three children in London, England. Visit him at ChrisCleave.com or on Twitter @ChrisCleave.

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Rating: 3.8031608577586207 out of 5 stars
4/5

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  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    It is well-nigh impossible to consider English author’s Chris Cleave’s debut novel Incendiary without remarking on its fateful timing. The novel’s England release coincided with the recent London bombings, and Cleave’s scenario has eerie parallels to the sad reality. Such a bizarre confluence can only result in controversy, and may overshadow much of Cleave’s accomplishment.While they will undoubtedly receive the most attention, the terrorist aspects of Incendiary are undoubtedly its weakest element. Much as in Jonathan Safran Foer’s recent, similarly themed Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, Cleave’s novel is far more successful as a character study; his nameless narrator is one of the strongest, most convincing personalities to grace the pages of literature in years.Incendiary takes the form of a lengthy letter, beginning “Dear Osama they want you dead or alive so the terror will stop.â€? Devastated by the deaths of her husband and son after a horrendous bombing, the narrator decides to write to Osama bin Laden, “so you can look into my empty life and see what a human boy really is from the shape of the hole he leaves behind.â€?Filtering London’s response to the attacks through her eyes, Cleave presents a sadly all-too-believable account of quickly institutionalized racism in a panicked public. As they rationalize their actions with statements such as “I’m sure 99% of the Muslims are fine but if you can’t trust some of them you can’t trust any of them can you,â€? Incendiary becomes not a study of terrorism, but a literary indictment of the lunacy that inevitably results from fear and misunderstanding.Cleave’s ultimate success, however, comes not from his plot, but from his bravura performance in capturing the voice of a woman facing indescribable pain, combining stylized turns of phrase, an absence of commas, and anomalous grammar to achieve something truly noteworthy. She is fully realized, an honest, imperfect woman with great reserves of passion, as well as a bottomless fount of cynicism. She also wields a black wit that helps Incendiary rise above its admittedly clumsy setup. When London closes down its bridges, she writes, “I never did work out how that was meant to help. Maybe they thought it would demoralise your Clapham cell Osama if they had to go via the M25 to bomb Chelsea.â€?Despite this success, as well as portraying the bloody chaos of a terrorist attack to an unnerving degree, Cleave badly falters with the shenanigans he foists upon his heroine. A creepy psychosexual relationship she enters into with her upscale neighbours never congeals into anything remotely believable. Her participation in a scheme to reveal government secrets stretches credulity to the snapping point. Cleave’s ending hinges on a terribly contrived setup that almost destroys the goodwill he has built up.Such lapses aside, Incendiary deserves to be recognized not only for its prescience, but for the emergence of an author with incredible promise. Cleave has achieved something magical, creating a character who lives on long after the last page has been read. If Cleave occasionally stumbles, she remains fiercely constant, and her story deserves to be read.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    A poignant book, written as a letter to Osama bin Laden after a bombing at a football match in London. It's difficult to say exactly what it's about, but it touches on a good few political and social issues.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Epistolary books aren't generally my taste, but this one surprised me. As with most books that take me aback, I read this at the suggestion of friends...it was nominated by popular vote in a book club in which I participate. First off, the narrator of the audiobook version adds an amazing amount of depth to the book, even to the point of leading me to pick up on some British humor that I might otherwise not have grasped. The book is a relatively quick read, weighing in at just over 300 pages in paperback, or 8 hours in audio.

    And it is funny!

    In fact, Cleave is amazingly adept at stepping between dry, witty humor and poignant explorations of loss that leaves the reader wanting to cry. The narrator, during a sexual romp with her lover, loses her husband and son to an al Queda terrorist attack on London. This book is her letter to Osama bin Laden following that attack. As you can see, the premise is humorous from the beginning, and it only gets funnier...and more heartbreaking.

    On the surface, this is a gripping story about a woman who has lost everything to a senseless act of terror, and, while traveling a grief-stricken journey to determine who to blame, slowly loses her grip on her sanity. At a deeper level, there is cultural critique here: not just on the barbarity of terrorists, but on the barbarity of the civilized world's response. As Cleave's protagonist loses her sanity to grief, the world around her (read: us) loses its sanity to fear. The image of a dark, near-future London with balloons hanging over the city bearing painted images of the dead haunts the reader for some time.

    The fascinating development of characters runs even deeper, however. The protagonist's lover's girlfriend is nearly a mirror image of our distraught narrator, and the juxtaposition of a woman who loses while holding onto her core values against another version of herself who wins through self-serving, opportunistic means is amazingly well done. This, I think, is what stayed with me the longest from this book.

    Incendiary is a quick read that will take you through an emotional journey that is well worth your time. The mirror that this novel holds to a post-September 11 world is provocative, and the conspiracy theorist twist at the end...well, let's just say that it is all too believable.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    "That is the nature of this madness. It fills the sky with barrage balloons and people's eyes with hate."Incendiary is, at least nominally an epistolary novel. An unnamed working-class woman living in London is writing a letter to Osama bin Laden after her husband and young son, along with a thousand other people, are killed in a "9-11"-type terrorist attack at a Premiership football match. The letter writer watched the mayhem unfold live on the television whilst a neighbour, a man that she barely knew, was busy having sex with her. Not surprisingly, the woman is deeply affected by the deaths, not only does she feel sorrow she also feels guilty and is looking for some sort of catharsis.The book is divided into four parts, one for each of the four seasons. It turns out she only began writing to Osama in 'Winter', but she tells her story chronologically, beginning in 'Spring'. This book takes reader on a wild journey of satire. The narrator is far from a perfect wife and mother. She is tidy, but gets nervous when her bomb-disposal husband is called out on a shout and she leaves her four year old son home alone whilst she goes out seeking comfort in the arms of other men.I loved the first half of this book. I found the woman's emotions raw and touching. Cleave wonderfully evokes not only the horror of the actual event but the knee-jerk responses that the authorities make on civil liberties after the event to supposedly deter further attacks.Unfortunately this strong start is let down by the second half when it suddenly becomes more about class; a tale of manipulative toffs exploiting an uncultured innocent. I found yuppie Jasper and his equally posh girlfriend Petra, both of them journalists for the Sunday Telegraph, so poorly drawn that they never rose to become anything other than cliches. Worst of all Osama, the person that is supposedly being addressed in the letter, largely disappears for long stretches. Consequently the book becomes less about terrorism and the toll it takes on individuals and more about class conflict in modern Britain.For a novel about terrorism there is very little suspense. Cleave shows a nice touch when a nurse is suspended from her job because she is a Muslim and therefore might pose a security risk but he doesn't follow it through. Likewise when the narrator learns that the authorities knew about 'May Day' attack beforehand but chose let it happen anyway Cleave seems to have no idea how to exploit it fully. In the age of the internet and video streaming the idea that people would take such explosive information to the papers where it can easily be suppressed is frankly ridiculous.That said and done some of the writing is really good, I found the woman's voice mesmerizing and I continually turned the page to see what would happen next. However I do think that this is a book of two halves, Cleave either got his thinking muddled or simply ran out of ideas perhaps. This was a great opportunity missed IMHO.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    After reading Little Bee by Mr. Cleave, I was anxious to read Incendiary. I was not disappointed.An unnamed English woman writes a novel-length letter to Osama bin Laden because he is responsible for a terrorist attack at a soccer stadium in London. Her husband and 4-year-old son are among the 1,000 who die.This novel deals with what happens to this mother and other survivors of such an attack. She is very much alone and refuses help to get through this ordeal. She allows others to take advantage of her without thinking of the consequences. She feels guilty about the deaths of her husband and son because while they were at the game, she was at home having sex with a neighbor she barely knew. Her morals are questionable, but she seems realistic trying to deal with the aftermath of the bombing. There are many touching moments that will make you sad, but since the author is English, there are many humorous moments due to the English sense of humor.I wouldn't call this novel fast-paced, but it does move forward. I didn't want to put it down. I am looking forward to reading more from Mr. Cleave.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Chris Cleave has imagined a similar scenario occurring in London. The story is narrated by a young English woman who recounts her story to “Dear Osama”. Cleave writes a vivid and compelling drama that is unfortunately only too easy to imagine.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Incendiary by Chris Cleave is written as a letter to Osama bin Laden. It is written in the words of a working class woman whose husband and four year old son perished in a terrorist bombing of a sports stadium. The young woman is experiencing all the grief and trauma that one would expect from such an event but she is also consumed by guilt as she was with another man when her “boys” were killed. Incendiary didn’t garner the best of reviews from the critics when it was first published due to it’s extraordinary timing. The book was released on July 7th, 2005, the same day four suicide bomb attacks took place in London. This timing caused most of the advertising and promotion of the book to be halted. Personally I found this an absorbing story of the aftermath of tragedy, both on the part of the main character as well as how it was handled by the British Authorities. Indiscriminate reprisals against Muslims, curfew being put in place, barrage balloons floating over the city all helped to create a background that had a very real feeling. As for the main character, I felt very sorry for her, but I had nothing in common with her and I disagreed with many of her decisions. I soon realized that she was going insane from the guilt and grief and that bad things were yet to come in her story.In Incendiary, the author shows his unique vision and I thought the novel was quite powerful, provocative and intelligent. I literally couldn’t put the book down. It’s definitely not a book to enjoy, but one that makes you think, stirs up your emotions and leaves you a little uneasy. This was my first book by Chris Cleave but I will definitely be reading more from this author.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    very creepy book, i was somewhat sucked in but not really bc i was enjoying it just bc i wanted to know what happened
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    London is reeling from the latest suicide bomb attack launched by terrorists. The Emirates Stadium, home of Arsenal football club, has been blown to smithereens during the last game of the season on May Day. Within hours the surrounding streets of the city are closed, bridges across the Thames heavily policed and all traffic along the river terminated in case of additional attacks.
    Over the next few weeks the death toll grows to over one thousand as England mourns her dead. Prince William tours the ward at Guy’s Hospital where many of the survivors of the bombing are hospitalized while top, government officials hide behind their advance knowledge of the attack.
    “Incendiary” is narrated as a letter to Obama by a widow of a police officer, killed at the game that he took their four-year old son to. As she grieves she writes a letter advising Bin Laden of all he is responsible for. The story told with the grim humor of the British working class often delights in it’s madness and alternatively brings tears as she bravely tackles her new world, alone and with some degree of insanity.
    The awfulness of the story and its proximity of London often reminded me, in its wonderful deliberate descriptive passages, of Chris Obani’s novella “Becoming Abigail”. When she describes the aftermath of the blast, the tower of smoke arising from the rubble as “angry and urgent like it was late for something” we feel the heat and smell the fumes. Her poignant description of her child as “boy is a good smell it is a cross between angels and tigers” you can understand the fierce love she has for her son.
    Cleave’s debut novel leaves one spell-bound as he takes us along for the mad dash on to Lambeth Bridge and tramples us over the edge into the river and immerses us in his break-through thriller.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I have such a love/hate relationship with Chris Cleave! I am intrigued with the way he constructs his stories, but I have such a hard time liking any of the characters. Maybe that's what he is going for. I wasn't sure what to think of this book until I got to the end. The last 50 pages are devastating and so well put together, it really brought everything full circle. Definitely worth a read, even if you despise pretty much everyone in the story.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    This was a fine book, though I wouldn't recommend parents reading it before bedtime. It caused more than a few weird dreams involving my children and their deaths or injury.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Chris Cleave does a terrific job of writing a painful story from a woman's perspective. This is a sad and somewhat terrifying story of the world we face today and into the future.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    With Incendiary, the reader is given a fictionalized London equivalent to 9/11, in this case “May Day”, an attack on a stadium full of fans attending an Arsenal football match. Among the one thousand victims are a woman’s husband and young son. Throughout the novel which includes plaintive remarks directed to the perpetrator, Osama bin Laden, the woman struggles to find reason to carry on. Sometimes it is only the presence of Mr. Rabbit, a surviving toy imbued with her son’s blood that allows her to navigate life after the tragedy. Only when the woman realizes that officials knew of the attack ahead of time does she find a purpose in trying to expose a government operating in collateral damage mode. Unsuccessful, of course, she ultimately realizes that her love for her son is larger than her anger, sadness, or revenge and that is her final message to bin Laden and his like. Published in 2005, this novel will forever be part of a fixed number of books framed by the 9/11 attack and the killing of Osama bin Laden. However, as just recently witnessed by the Boston Marathon bombings, there will always be a need for a Mr. Rabbit in whatever form it may take shape.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Not my usual kind of book, so I was surprised that I liked it as much as I did. I found it a little difficult to connect with nameless characters, though, but other than that, a really interesting read.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    The narrator is a woman whose husband and little boy are killed when terrorists bomb a London soccer stadium. She writes of the aftermath in a letter to Osama bin Laden . Good read, but intense and graphic.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Captivating. A woman writes to Osama bin Laden after the deaths of her husband and son in a terror attack. So readable and sad. She is so strong and weak at the same time. She needs help, but is too independent to really ask for or accept help. I don't know if anyone realizes how off the deep end she is until she is so isolated that there is no one to notice...
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Chris Cleave's second novel, "Little Bee," has been a big bestseller, and deservedly so. But not until that book sold so well did Simon & Schuster, Cleave's American publisher, bring out his first novel, "Incendiary," in paperback. "Incendiary" is every bit as good as "Little Bee."The novel takes the form of a letter written to Osama bid Laden after terrorists bomb a London soccer stadium, killing hundreds of fans. The letter is written by a working class young woman, whose husband, a police officer, and little boy are at the match. She watches on television when the stadium explodes. Her intense grief is complicated by guilt because she is having sex with another man when it happens.With a narrative voice much like that of Little Bee, the African girl who tells her story in that second novel, the narrator of "Incendiary" descends from grief into madness while making the reader laugh and cry at the same time. Other important characters include a newspaper columnist, Jasper Black, the man she was having sex with when the stadium explodes; Petra Sutherland, Jasper's other girlfriend, a posh beauty who also writes for the newspaper; and Terence Butcher, her husband's supervisor at Scotland Yard, with whom she has an affair until he discloses a terrible secret that pushes her over the edge. I don't know if Osama bin Laden would have appreciated a letter like this, but most other readers will find it fascinating.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    This narrator needed someone to really support her. Even before she lost her family, it didn't seem like she had support, but at least she had something. After, she had nothing. I couldn't get it out of my head, that someone could have just glanced at her and seen that she was lost and hurting, someone should have really helped. Instead, everyone she met used her. And she had no real way of stopping her pain. This book unnerved me, which is probably the intended effect, but I don't think I can say that I liked it.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Not for the faint of heart, but certainly for the literary. Better than Little Bee. It was lent to me by someone who really disliked the book and wanted my opinion on it. It confirms my belief that my taste in books is very different from this friend's. Yes, there are some VERY GRAPHIC SCENES in the novel, though the first one, mixed with the football match was actually comical. I love the narrator's voice -- the lack of commas (and the comment referring to their troublesome nature), the frankness, the descriptions, the all-capitals phrases, it is so original and vibrant. There are many wonderful dry witty remarks, quite in keeping with British humour that I found myself almost laughing out loud, and certainly smiling, during this book. Perhaps that's why the book is so good: it has a very dark storyline that the humour is essential. The book deals with how we deal with tragedy, how different people deal with it differently, and one way is to hold on to humour. The charactes are interesting, the story moves forward at a good pace and the details are exceptional (that is, there are many details that make the story seem true, and when details are not needed they are not given). The metaphors and analogies in the narration are concrete (literary) and creatively spot-on. The story pulls you along even though you're not sure you can deal with the trauma. It's not at all like Life of Pi in its plot or themes, really, yet there are a number of ways in which I think people who liked that book will like this one.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    As other reviewers have said or implied, this book is heavy, intense, and disturbing. It's also funny, poignant, and moving. It's a letter to Osama bi Laden from a woman who loses her son and husband in a terrorist attack at a "footie" game in London. Before the tragedy, you get a feel for the protagonist's anxiety - possibly OCD. She counts and organizes to manage her fears. She also drinks and cheats on her husband, less than laudable but entirely realistic. More than once as I read the book, I found myself thinking "can one more terrible thing happen?" and the answer was "yep," but I couldn't put it down. For a relatively short novel, Cleave effectively creates characters who are multidimensional. They are neither all-good nor all-bad. Most of them balance out at more unlikeable than not, but I think that's part of Cleave's success: he presents human beings who are acting out their irreconcilable desire for meaning & connection on one hand and for survival and comfort on the other. He allows this devastated mother to feel compassion for Osama, although it lasts only briefly (and how true that feels). Cleave also presents the face of poverty without sugar coating but also without melodrama. After finishing this read, try to walk by a homeless person sleeping in a doorway under a sheet of bubble wrap without feeling some compassionate curiosity about how s/he landed there. Impossible. I don't know if this book will land on my "favorites" list. If it does, it may be mostly because Mr. Rabbit stays with me as such a wonderful, terrible symbol of all that we hope for and how damaged we can become along the way.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    This book is just one giant ball of depression. This was very hard for me to read. I think when a terrorist attack happens, the only way to deal with it is to do your best to not think of each indivual person that is killed. You will just go completely crazy if you do. This book forces you to connect with a mother whose young son and husband are killed in a bombing. You have to think about things that some people don't ever want to think about, like what happens to the surviving members of a family so brutally torn apart? I liked that the author did not give the main character a name, nor did he give her husband and son a name. They could be anyone, this could happen to anyone. I think it was a very original way to write a book, and a very effective way as well. I don't think I would have liked nor connected with the mother had her story been told in any other way. She wasn't perfect, and her morals were definitely not the best, but you can't help but feel for her.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I read Chris Cleave's New York Times bestseller Little Bee last year around this time. (Review here) It was a stunningly powerful read. When the chance to read his re-issued first novel, Incendiary, came up I was hesitant. Frankly, I didn't know if I wanted to experience the subject matter, but I find Cleave's writing compelling, so I said yes. And I'm glad I did.Incendiary is told in the form of a long rambling letter to Osama Bin Laden by an unnamed female narrator. Osama's forces bombed the football stadium where her husband and son were attending a game. They, along with thousands of others, were killed. "I want to be the last mother in the world who ever has to write a letter like this. Who ever has to write to you Osama about her dead boy."The narrative rambles and meanders as she attempts to deal with her loss and grief. The lack of puncuation and run on sentences only serve to emphasize her state of mind. Her sorrow and anguish are palpable. The terror and confusion of the aftermath of an attack to both the city and it's citizens is sharply drawn. I was appalled and horrified by some of the situations she finds herself in - the other two supporting characters were quite ugly in many ways - but I couldn't stop turning page after page. Powerful, moving, yes - humourous, frightening, disturbing, heart breaking, but oh, what an addicting read. I'm saddened to think that she won't be the last mother in the world who will want to write a letter like this....
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Before I get to this review, I just thought I would let you know that I was dreading reading this. First of all a child dies, and I have a hard time reading books where anything bad happens to children – I’ve got 2 kids, it makes me think of them. Even before I had kids I had a hard time reading this sort of thing, because it usually ended with me crying like a baby. Second of all it has to do with a horrendous act of terrorism very close to 9/11 (My oldest son Jake was born on this date btw) and the July 5, 2005 attack on London. This brings up so many emotions and feelings that I have a hard time expressing. It makes me feel hate & I really don’t want to feel that. But the Random House rep pleaded to give it a chance – and I am not good at saying no, so I gave it a chance and I am glad I did.Also must mention I am typing this up at 1am since my youngest fell off his chair and banged his head really hard on the tile floor so I have to wake him up every hour to make sure he doesn’t have a concussion. Bad timing on his part I have to say, I am already emotional after reading this book and I may have overreacted when he fell and I dragged him right away to the walk in clinic. So sorry if any of this doesn’t make sense or is overly emotional!The Good Stuff• Wonderfully written• Heartbreaking and raw and very real• Darkly funny at times, you will laugh out loud even while you are crying• Author has a true understanding of post-traumatic stress and grief• The main character is so believable in her grief and the authors description of her grief is so raw and powerful it brought tears to my eyes (why must I never learn to not read this stuff on the bus)• The parts with the frickin rabbit ripped my heart out and stomped on it on quite a few occasions• Really makes you think about terrorism, grief, revenge and so much moreThe Not So Good Stuff • Really disliked the ending - a bit of a downer• Really didn’t understand how she dealt with her nervousness at the beginning – it seemed out of place with her feelings for her husband and child• Also the thought of her leaving her child alone so she could go out and get a drink and have a little nooky made me incredibly angry• Older son is a little freaked cause Mom came home with tears in her eyes and gave him such a big hug – also he mocked me afterwards – damn 9 yr olds and their disgust with emotional moms : )What I Learned• Quite a few new English sayingsFavourite Quotes“Dear Osama they want you dead or alive so the terror will stop. Well I wouldn’t know about that I mean rock ‘n’ roll didn’t stop when Elvis died on the khazi it just got worse. Next thing you know there was Sonny & Cher and Dexys Midnight Runners.”“Nobody knew why you made them be Arsenal fans. Does Allah hate the Gunners even more than he hates the west in general or was it just a coincidence?”“You’re a bit of a Knightsbridge girl yourself at heart Osama. We never see you without your AK47 and matching bullet belt I suppose Allah is big on accessories.”4 Dewey’sI received this from Random House in exchange for an honest review
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    A well-written, poignant look at terrorism, both cause and effect.[Warning: spoilers further down, don't read on if you don't want to know the ending]The effect comes first - a British woman suffers the loss of her husband and son when a suicide bomber kills a thousand people by detonating a bomb in the middle of the crowd at an Arsenal game. She writes a letter to Osama bin Laden, and this book is the result. It's calm, moving, never melodramatic. The woman's loss is tempered by guilt - while her husband and son were at the football match, she was having sex with a journalist, Jasper Black.The twist comes when she finds out that the police had advance warning of the attack, but did nothing to prevent it. To do so would have been to compromise their intelligence by showing they had informers, etc. Of course they didn't realise how bad the casualties would be, but the point is they knew and did nothing. It's a story with historical resonance, from Pearl Harbor and Coventry to the more recent 9/11 conspiracy theories.This is where the 'cause' part comes in. She tries to tell people what she knows, but it's covered up. Jasper writes a story for his newspaper, but his editor/fiancee Petra spikes it under pressure from the government. In his desperation Jasper then arranges a simulated act of terrorism in Parliament Square to draw attention to his story, and the woman herself (is her name ever mentioned? If it was I can't remember it) goes to visit Petra in her office, intending to douse her in petrol and set her alight.But she can't do it - she pulls back. Despite the provocation, the 'just cause', she can't hate another human being enough to kill them, can't stop feeling. She tells Osama that love is stronger than hate:"Come to me and we will blow the world back together with incredible noise and fury."It was a fascinating meditation on terrorism, more intelligent and nuanced than any others I've read, and there was plenty of action to keep things going as well.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    What would you expect from a book begins with the words "Dear Osama"? The narrator of [Incendiary], a woman who lost her husband and four-year old son in a terrorist bombing of a new London soccer stadium, tells her story in a long letter to bin Laden, hoping to convince him to stop the madness. This is much more than a weepy sob story, however, and the narrator is much more than a sad victim. While her grief and despair are never far from the surface, she also experiences guilt, rage, recklessness, madness, and even moments of empathy for the terrorists. Her fate seems to be inextricably interwoven with that of Jasper Black, a journalist with whom she had a one-night (well, maybe two or three night in the end) stand and his posh fiancée, fashion columnist Petra Sutherland. The novel even comes close to being a whodunnit, but its real heart is the emotional journey of the unnamed narrator.If you've seen the film version of [Incendiary], you really don't know the book, because, aside from the basic plot and the two men with whom the widow gets involved, Jasper and Detective Butcher, there aren't a lot of similarities. The film excludes a lot and adds a lot more, and the endings are completely different.I was impressed with Cleave's second novel, [Little Bee], and wanted to experience his first book, [Incendiary] as well. I was not disappointed. Cleave is particularly skilled in creating interesting characters in pain who are on the way to being healed.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Audiobook...........A thought provoking book about the tragic consequences of mindless violence. The acts of violence run the gamut from an Al Qaeda terrorist bomb exploding at a soccer match, in which the narrator's husband and son are killed to acts by individuals which are the expression of fear and anger and loss. The narrative trick of setting the entire story as a letter from the narrator to Osama bin Laden is interesting. I think the author, who also wrote "Little Bee" knows his stuff when it comes to post-traumatic psychology. Well done, moving story, and full of the ambivalence that is human nature.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    The pages of this book dash by at the speed of light – it has such immediacy and is so compelling that I was a third of the way in before I had chance to catch my breath. Written with the ‘voice’ of an ordinary Londoner, with a deliberate lack of grammar (could of, should of etc) it tells of a terrorist attack on London in which the narrator’s husband and son are killed. Rather than just spiral into a study of grief (though it does that too) the book keeps unexpected plot twists up its sleeve, and though the pace slackens a little in the middle third, the book retains the power to shock and surprise with the directions it is prepared to take.There were only a few bum notes as far as I was concerned. The fact that the narrator claims kinship with the great unwashed of London’s East End, but lives across the road from the features editor of the Sunday Telegraph, and the fierce determination not to name the main character and her family members. It was innovative when Daphne du Maurier did it, but it’s getting a bit old hat now. Also, the tendency for characters to address eachother using their first name and their surname. Surely people only do that in books and soap operas? In every other respect, though, this story was hauntingly real, full of pathos, and massively thought- provoking. Definitely hoping for more from this highly innovative author.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Wonderfully creative! Incendiary was a selection for my book club, and probably not a book I would have chosen on my own, but I could not put it down once I started reading. The story, in the form of a widow's letter to Osama bin Laden, manages to mix laugh out loud humor with terrible heartache and humanity's best with humanity's worst. A book I will definitely be recommending:)
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Chris Cleave's Incendiary is so emotional, so ... dare I say it ... raw. Wonderfully written.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    I loved Chris Cleave’s Little Bee, so when my husband learned that I was meeting a friend in a bookstore, he told me I should look for Cleave’s first book Indendiary and see if I’d like that too. So I looked.Pages of compliments to the author at the start of a book do tend to have a bad effect on me. By the time I’d found the first page of writing, my bookstore coffee was cold. I almost wrote the novel off as artsy and not my style but then I stopped and read again. And I was thoroughly hooked.The novel starts as a letter: “Dear Osama.” But the correspondent’s no great politician, no stop-at-nothing soldier or truth-telling journalist, not even priest or a cleric, but rather a very ordinary Londoner mourning her dead boy and telling her tale.And what a tale. Incendiary is haunting, mesmerizing even. Yet, despite its topic, it’s also laugh-out-loud funny. When a neighbor in the high-class Wellington Estate tells the woman he thinks she’s “very real,” she responds that no-one’s ever said that before, probably because they thought it so “bleeding obvious.” But all the characters in this novel are heart-breakingly real, even Mr. Rabbit whose constant presence haunts and holds it together.Of course, I’m English. There are places and names that I know as I sink into my chair and into the tale. I’m comfortable. I recognize this voice. But suddenly that quiet world falls spectacularly and totally apart. The author goes where others might justifiably fear to tread and creates something powerfully terrifying and horribly plausible.Betrayal is such a simple word. We use it in so many ways. But one betrayal does not equal another, and Chris Cleave’s novel has a depth and honesty that leaves the reader crying, not just for the dead boy, but for all the hopes and dreams that die in everyday betrayals, and for a world that might well be all too real, but really can’t be trusted.Incendiary is a masterpiece, just like Little Bee, and highly recommended.