The Fire Fighter

by Francis Cottam (Author)

• Used

  Hardcover
  2001

  $14.90

  Sebastian Faulks meets Robert Harris in a wonderfully evocative and thrilling first novel about a firefighter in London at the height of the Blitz. Autumn, 1940, and the Luftwaffe is firebombing London, a capital rendered virtually defenceless by a legacy of appeasement and governmental incompetence. Jack Finlay, a young man already notorious for his capacity to fight fires, and men, is hauled reluctantly back from his artillery unit in the Western Desert. Finlay's Liverpool past is murky but London needs him now no questions asked to wage an elemental battle on streets made strange by the scale of the destruction.His task is to do all he can to prevent five buildings vital to Britain s war effort from being engulfed. But resources are scarce, the mood bleak and Finlay himself suspicious about the real motive for the mission assigned to him by his enigmatic Whitehall taskmaster, Captain Grey. And then Finlay falls in love with a woman as unorthodox as he is: a wartime liaison as improbable as it is intense, which makes him vulnerable. With a cynical eye and a tender heart, this taut, tantalizing novel tracks a dangerous intelligence game, and spotlights with a rare and telling force, the indiscriminate path of war and fire through ordinary lives.

• Used

  Paperback
  2002

  $4.20

  Set in WWII London, in the last months of 1940 when the Blitz and destruction and firebombing were at their worst and morale was at its lowest. A young man, Jack Finlay, is called back from the African front to mastermind the firefighting in a small but crucial area of the City of London, looking after 5 rather mysterious buildings in particular. In the pre-war period he was a legendary firefighter, though his past is rather murky - poor Liverpool Irish Catholic, sent to Borstal for fighting, and generally suspect because of his unnatural interest in fires, thought to be an arsonist. His father was a WWI hero - and one of the beautifully handled themes of the novel is the effect of that war on those who survived to fight another so soon after, and on their sons. Our hero finds himself a pawn in an Intelligence game, and in British Intelligence's attempts to feed false intelligence to the Germans at a crucial point in the war. He falls in love with a young woman who's the curator of one of the buildings which was built by her German (disgraced) architect father - she to is being manipulated (or is she?) and the crisis comes when she is caught in the burning building. With its brilliantly vivid evocation of London in the Blitz, an unusual love story, an emotional heart but a cynical eye, and devastatingly good descriptions of fire (how it moves and works and destroys), this unusual and assured first novel has real appeal for men and women alike.