Charlie Johnson In The Flames - Hardcover

Ignatieff, Michael

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0701176075 ISBN 13: 9780701176075

Publisher: Chatto & Windus, 2003

Synopsis

Intense, visceral and moving novel from Booker-shortlisted author of Scar Tissue, about what war does to us all - like a modern-day Graham Greene, but with contemporary secular guilt. Charlie Johnson is a veteran war correspondent who thinks he has seen it all - until he makes one rash expedition to a small outpost on the Kosovan-Serb border in 1998. Horrified, he watches the woman who sheltered them rush up the track, her clothes ablaze - and he runs out to embrace and try to save her. But he too is caught in the deadly fire that engulfs her. From now on, his life is consumed by the mission to find the man who killed her - caught on film by his friend and cameraman Jacek. Drawing on his own experience of war zones, in this disturbing, thoughtful novel Michael Ignatieff probes into the damage that blights Charlie's life and threatens to destroy his humanity, the result of years of numbing reporting of terrible events. Charlie has people who love him, not only his wife and daughter at home in London, but also generous, tough and resolute colleagues like Jacek and the indefatigable and beautiful Etta. But once he is set on his journey of revenge, nothing and no one can stop him. Charlie Johnson in the Flames is a remarkable book, combining a clear-sighted and introspective account of the evils of war, with a tender love story and a thriller-like plot, leading to a dramatic and heart-wrenching conclusion.

About this title

Product Description:

Physical description; 150 p. ; 22 cm. Subjects; War correspondents - Fiction. War - Psychological aspects - Fiction.

Review:

"Charlie Johnson in the Flames is that good, belonging to the same order of thrillers by writers like Graham Greene, Len Deighton and Lionel Davidson" (Independent)

"A painfully believable novel about the human cost of war in the Balkans" (Lisa Jardine Sunday Times)

"Michael Ignatieff's cast of characters... are drawn to perfection" (Irish Times)

"Michael Ignatieff's third novel has a compressed, cinematic brilliance. You can read it in two hours, but the images it contains linger far longer than that...The texture of the novel marks this down as superior fiction" (Sunday Telegraph)

About this edition

• Publisher: Chatto & Windus
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 0701176075
• ISBN 13: 9780701176075
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 160