Excerpt from Night of Fire by Colin Thubron, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Occasionally these numbers trembled out of the meaninglessness of their charts and lodged in the real sky. The near-infinite speed of light yet travelled so slowly through the firmament that it might reach humans thousands of millennia after its departure, transmitting the image of a star as it had been long ago. Sometimes it dawned on him that everything he witnessed up here was long departed. He was watching only the dead. He saw the Coma cluster as it had existed when creatures on Earth were still confined to the sea; and the light of dim blue galaxies, now invisibly touching him, had started out before the Earth came into being and might replicate for people's eyes, as if in a time warp, the process of Earth's creation. And time itself, of course, was not an absolute; it might be bent by the force of gravity, even reversed within a black hole. Given light and time, he imagined, his own past life could shake back into fragmented being.

The meteor shower stayed desultory, and the wind had hardened. He thought he smelt something burning. He imagined it a neighbour's dying bonfire, and peered down into the garden. But he saw nothing. Another hour would pass before the rain of meteors reached its climax, so he descended the narrow stairs to his studio, pushing between heaped files and film cassettes, and eased open the bedroom door. His wife was sleeping. He could hear the harsh whisper of her lungs – the sound that had first distressed him four years ago – and saw the laboured rise and fall of her upper body under the blankets. She was facing the ceiling from a tangle of auburngrey hair. Her slanted eyes were closed. He stooped and softly kissed their corners, then went out, shutting the door.

The faint stench of burning rose again. He assumed a tenant overcooking something, but the smell was acrid, unfamiliar. Sometimes the tenants themselves seemed alien to him. Immured in five storeys beneath him, most had been here on old leases almost as long as he could remember. Some rarely left their rooms. Others came and went seemingly at random. He saw them on stairways or in the corridors, where often the timer switch was defunct, and in the gloom he barely recognised them, while they, in turn, might not acknowledge him. One or two looked haggard and frail, as if life had discarded them. But over time his distaste for them had dissipated, and now he felt towards several a remote indulgence, even tenderness. Occasionally he asked them questions in passing (they did not always answer). He had come to think of them as uneasy acquaintances.

He could not sleep. Yesterday, trying to bring coherence to past disorder, he had assembled his old 8mm cine films – many still in their Kodak envelopes, shot over fifty years ago – and started splicing them together with the same thin brush and pungent glue left over from his youth. He began this as a night-time chore, with the feeling – nostalgic and uneasy – of reviving a practice abandoned long ago. He did not know if the lamp would blow on his obsolete projector, or if the acetate glue would still hold.

Tonight, in the darkened room, as he waited for the hour of the meteors, the first film strip bunched on its spool with a brittle crackling. He eased it free, started again and a yellowish light appeared on his screen. In its dust-framed rectangle, the image came up of a young woman on a bare stage. With the film's celluloid flaking away, she seemed to move under black rain. It was a second before he recognised her, that elfin brightness. She was fooling about as usual, gesturing at nobody in sight. The theatre seats were empty.

In a lull between rehearsals, she had lifted an auburn wig from her blonde-streaked hair and was addressing it like Hamlet his skull. The camera strayed playfully, affectionately, over her. Without cinematic sound, her mouth opened and closed in noiseless exclamations, and her laughter was a silent hiatus. Once she turned to the camera, complaining of its gaze on her. The next minute she was clowning again, mimicking the curtain calls of her fellow actors, curtseying coyly, bowing augustly. Then her hands lifted and splayed, blacking out the screen, and she was gone.

From the book: Night of Fire by Colin Thubron. Copyright © 2017 by Colin Thubron. Reprinted courtesy of Harper, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.