` It began with a spark.` A house is burning. Its six tenants include a failed priest, a naturalist, a neurosurgeon & an invalid dreaming of his anxious boyhood. Their landlord`s relationship to them is both intimate & shadowy. At times he shares their preoccupations & memories. He will also share their fate. In Night of Fire the passions & obsessions in a dying house loom & shift, from the hallucinating drug addict in the basement to the landlord training his telescope on the night skies. The tenants` stories range through an African refugee camp, a Greek Orthodox sanctuary & the cremation-grounds of India: memories that start to criss-cross & mutate in a novel of lingering beauty & mystery. Night of Fire is Colin Thubron`s fictive masterpiece.