“Once upon a time, there was a beautiful village inside an ancient forest on the slope of a mountain that looked down upon the sea.” As the protagonist, Irini, repeats this refrain throughout Christy Lefteri’s latest novel The Book of Fire, the words start to feel like an omen of tragedy instead of a fairy-tale beginning. One scorching summer day, Irini’s idyllic Greek island village is irrevocably transformed when a fire set by a man greedy to build property burns out of control. Irini, her husband, Tasso, and her daughter, Chara, survive the hellish experience with scars both visible and painfully unseen. In the fire’s aftermath, Irini begins to record what happened in a journal that she calls “The Book of Fire.” She cannot bring herself to play her beloved music, much like how Tasso, an artist, cannot lift his paintbrush. Her village—the village of her great-grandfather—is mourning the beauty and innocence it has lost along with the people who died. The villagers focus their collective grief and anger into hatred for the man who started the fire. And yet, in her confusion and pain, Irini wonders about a broader shared responsibility for the devastation, asking, “Could there be something destructive and barren in all of us that bleeds out onto our land?”
Much like she did in Songbirds, which elevated the voices of migrant domestic workers, Lefteri draws on real events in this new novel, having traveled to Mati, Greece, to speak to locals about the fire they endured in 2018. In The Book of Fire, Lefteri turns her sensitive gaze to global climate change and how increasingly prevalent deadly fires have become. Her zealousness in warning of the dangers posed by our neglect of the land and its needs occasionally veers into overt preaching, yet this sense of urgency does propel the plot forward. Her language, as always, is evocative and precise, and her story remains heartbreaking even as it inches toward healing and the hope of restoration. Irini observes that the “fire has burnt our souls, our hearts. It has turned to ashes the people we once were,” but this stalwart community, like the ancient chestnut tree that figures prominently in the story, is “still alive . . . and its branches reach up to the sun.”
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