The Trouble with Fire

Eleven long stories linked by the theme of fire, in three parts. In the first, a novelist is confronted by a school friend who still wants answers about something that happened long ago; others tell of an adulterous affair that ends in disaster, two respectable women visiting an old classmate in prison, two women travelling to Australia for abortions in the 1970s, a widower whose grief a second wife cannot ease, and a writer whose husband falls gravely ill in Hanoi. The middle part gives three versions of one family story, a woman's disappearance in the 1930s, as later generations tell it. The last two stories are based on real lives: those of the former prime minister Gordon Coates and of Lady Barker.

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About the book

Form

Short stories

Set in

New Zealand, Vietnam

First published

2011

Author's age

71 when first published

ISBN

9781869793593 (Vintage, New Zealand)