Incendiary

A terrorist attack on Highbury stadium - a woman grieving for her husband and son - a first novel destined to set the literary world alight. Not since Alex Garland's The Beach has there been a first novel by a young male writer so guaranteed to arrest readers' attention by being of the moment, keep them hooked with the tension of its plotting, and feed their minds with its portrait of a distopian society. And yet Cleave has dared to do in a novel what Garland has only done on celluloid in 28 Days Later. He has created an extraordinary portrait of London paralysed with fear after a massive terrorist attack - and, even more extraordinary, he has done so from the point of view of a woman. Highbury Stadium has been turned into an inferno by eleven suicide bombers during an Arsenal-Chelsea match. Our narrator has lost both her husband and her four-year-old son, so she writes a letter to Osama Bin Laden to tell him exactly what she thinks. She doesn't know about commas. She comes from Bethnal Green and hasn't had much education. But, being from the East End, her family has been bombed before and she thinks that Osama should know what it feels like. chilling picture of London under siege (with barrage balloons to stop low-flying aircraft and a midnight curfew), and also a savage dissection of the British class system. Because, although the death of her husband tears her apart, our narrator wasn't a saint. She had become embroiled in a posh bloke from across the street who sought in her 'realness' something he couldn't find at home, and got more than he bargained for...