Charlie Johnson In The Flames

Description

Charlie Johnson is a veteran war correspondent who thinks he has seen it all - until he makes one rash expedition into a war zone in the Balkans. Horrified, he watches as a woman who sheltered him is set on fire. As he tries to save her, he too is caught in the deadly fire that engulfs her. From then on, his life is consumed by the mission to find the man who did it - caught on film by his friend and cameraman Jacek. Drawing on his own experience of war zones, Michael Ignatieff probes into the damage that blights Charlie's life and threatens to destroy his humanity. Charlie has people who love him, not only his wife and daughter, but also colleagues like Jacek and the indefatigable and beautiful Etta. But once he is set on his journey of revenge, nothing and no one can stop him.

Michael Ignatieff is Carr Professor of Human Rights Policy at Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University. He is an outstanding literary and cultural commentator, and also a powerful novelist, shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1993 for Scar Tissue. He is well known, too, as a presenter and critic on radio and television. His non-fiction books include a biography of Isaiah Berlin, and four books on ethnic war and intervention Blood and Belonging, The Warrior's Honour, Virtual War, and, most recently, Empire Lite- Nation Building in Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan.

Charlie Johnson in the Flames is that good, belonging to the same order of thrillers by writers like Graham Greene, Len Deighton and Lionel Davidson * Independent * A painfully believable novel about the human cost of war in the Balkans -- Lisa Jardine * Sunday Times * Michael Ignatieff's cast of characters... are drawn to perfection * Irish Times * Michael Ignatieff's third novel has a compressed, cinematic brilliance. You can read it in two hours, but the images it contains linger far longer than that...The texture of the novel marks this down as superior fiction * Sunday Telegraph *