Incendiary - Audio CD - Unabridged Author:Chris Cleave, Susan Lyons (Narrator) A distraught woman writes a letter to Osama bin Laden after her four-year-old son and her husband are killed in a massive suicide bomb attack at a soccer match in London. — In an emotionally raw voice alive with grief, compassion, and startling humor, she tries to convince Osama to abandon his terror campaign by revealing to him the desperate sad... more »ness -- "I am a woman built on the wreckage of myself" -- and the broken heart of a working-class life blown apart.
But the bombing is only the beginning. While security measures transform London into a virtual occupied territory, the narrator, too, finds herself under siege. At first she gains strength by fighting back, taking a civilian job with the police to aid the antiterrorist effort. But when she becomes involved with an upper-class couple, she is drawn into a psychological maelstrom of guilt, ambition, and cynicism that erodes her faith in the society she's working to defend. And when a new bomb threat sends the city into a deadly panic ("It was a panic like the darkest dream and the more people ran out onto the streets the bigger the panic got like a monster made of human beings") she is pushed to acts of unfathomable desperation -- perhaps her only chance for survival.
A surreal vision made brilliantly, viscerally powerful and undeniable, Incendiary is a stunning debut novel.
Read by Susan Lyons. 7 audio discs (8.25 hr.)« less