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A young boy driven by love to seek the truth, even if it means his deepest beliefs are wrong.
Twenty-year-old Skyler saw the incident out her window: Some sort of metallic object hovering over the Golden Gate Bridge just before it collapsed and a mushroom cloud lifted above the city. Like everyone, she ran, but she couldn't outrun the radiation, with her last thoughts being of her beloved baby brother, Dorian, safe in her distant family home.
Flash forward to a post-incident America, where the country has been broken up into territories and Muslims have been herded onto the old Indian reservations in the west, even though no one has determined who set off the explosion that destroyed San Francisco. Twelve-year old Dorian dreams about killing Muslims and about his sister - even though Dorian's parents insist Skyler never existed. Are they still shell-shocked, trying to put the past behind them ... or is something more sinister going on?
Meanwhile, across the street, Dorian's neighbor adopts a Muslim orphan from the territories. It will set off a series of increasingly terrifying incidents that will lead to either tragedy or redemption for Dorian, as he struggles to prove that his sister existed - and was killed by a terrorist attack.
Not on Fire, but Burning is unlike anything you're read before - not exactly a thriller, not exactly sci-fi, not exactly speculative fiction, but rather a brilliant and absorbing adventure into the dark heart of an America that seems ripped from the headlines. But just as powerfully, it presents a captivating hero: A young boy driven by love to seek the truth, even if it means his deepest beliefs are wrong.
"Starred Review. [Hrbek's] engagement with themes of loss and recovery and his vibrantly lyrical prose style reach a peak in this dark, allusive fantasy, which seems intended as a metaphor for the anxieties still lurking in our post-9/11 universe." - Kirkus
"A profound cautionary tale, a vivid and often deeply unnerving reminder that our choices carry real and lasting consequences." - Publishers Weekly
This information about Not on Fire, but Burning was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Greg Hrbek won the James Jones First Novel award for his book The Hindenberg Crashes Nightly. His short fiction has appeared in Harper's Magazine and numerous literary journals, and in The Best American Short Stories anthology. He is writer in residence at Skidmore College.
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