Incendiary

by Chris Cleave (Author)

• Used

  Hardcover
  2005

  $21.98

• Used

  Paperback
  2006

  $3.49

  Angry, funny, controversial and unpredictable, Incendiary will be one of the most talked-about books of 2005. Not since Alex Garland's The Beach has a debut novel used such compulsive storytelling to convey a distopian vision of moral degradation. Not since Roddy Doyle's The Woman Who Walked Into Doors has a male writer created such a powerful female voice. From her first sentence, Cleave's narrator seduces the reader with her biting, deadpan wit, her no-nonsense attitude and her love for her son. Over the next 250 pages, we must watch her suffer. Eleven suicide bombers turn the stadium into an inferno during an Arsenal-Chelsea match. Her husband and four-year-old son are blown to smithereens. She is left with an empty ex-Council flat in Bethnal Green and nothing to live for. And so she writes Osama Bin Laden a letter to tell him just what she thinks, a letter that takes the reader into a frightening maze of class-bound relationships - and right to the dark heart of a London under siege. A unique, twisted powerhouse of a novel, Incendiary has had readers staying up all night to finish it, then up half the next night arguing about it. Not since Martin Amis has a writer pinned a generation down on a mat like this and refused to allow it up till it admits it's rotten.

• New

  Paperback
  2009

  $13.31

  You aren't stupid.
  You know there's no such thing as a perfect mother.
  Plenty of other books will tell you there is, but this one won't lie to you.

  I was weak and I cheated and I was punished, but my god I loved my child through all of it.
  Love means you never break, and it means you're stronger than the things they do to you. I know this is true because I have been through fire, and I am the proof that love survives.

  I am not a perfect mother but I will tell you the perfect truth, because this is you and me talking.
  This is my story.