Description
Anita Shreve’s career catapulted when Oprah Winfrey recommended Shreve’s 1998 novel, The Pilot’s Wife, to her television book club. I have been a devotee ever since, which is why I was delighted that her latest offering, The Stars are Fire, didn’t disappoint. Set in the late 1940s against the backdrop of the monumentally destructive Maine fires, a young wife is disillusioned with her husband and marriage, and then fire intervenes. While Grace, the protagonist, is left alone with her children, her husband joins the volunteer firefighters, but she proves that adversity is the mother of invention and she is braver and stronger than she ever could have imagined. Shreve has skilfully juxtaposed the destruction of a state with the portrait of a bad marriage. The result is an evocative re-creation of post-war, pre-feminist American society. The Stars are Fire is the perfect weekend indulgence, and it’s the kind of book you won’t easily forget.
