The Fire Fighter

Sebastian Faulks meets Robert Harris in a wonderfully evocative and thrilling first novel about a firefighter in London at the height of the Blitz. Autumn, 1940, and the Luftwaffe is firebombing London, a city rendered virtually defenceless by a legacy of appeasement and governmental incompetence. Jack Finlay, a young man already notorious for his capacity to fight fires, and men, is hauled reluctantly back from his artillery unit on the African front to mastermind the firefighting in a crucial area of the City, looking after five rather mysterious buildings in particular. Finlay's Liverpool past is murky but London needs him now. He finds himself a pawn in an Intelligence game, and in British Intelligence's attempt to feed false intelligence to the Germans at a crucial point in the war. He falls in love with a young woman who's the curator of one of the buildings which was built by her disgraced German architect father - she too is being manipulated and the crisis comes when she is caught in the burning building. With a cynical eye and a tender heart, this taut, well-written novel tracks a dangerous intelligence game, and spotlights the indiscriminate path of war and fire through ordinary lives.