NIGHT OF FIRE, Colin Thubron’s first novel in more than a decade, opens with the landlord of an aging apartment building standing on the roof. He’s an amateur astronomer, awaiting the arrival of a meteor shower. Little does he know, though, as his eyes are turned to the heavens, the drama that’s about to unfold below, as a stray spark ignites a conflagration that will rip through the small building.

From the landlord, Thubron then focuses in turn on each of the building’s inhabitants, allowing their diverse pasts to speak even as smoke and vapors threaten to engulf their futures. There’s the stubbornly rational neurosurgeon, troubled by two recent cases, who can’t wait to marry his fiancée and finally start his real life. There’s an aging priest who has lost his faith, a naturalist who sees infinite beauty through a microscope lens, and a photographer who wonders what, exactly, he captures when he commits people’s images to film.

"NIGHT OF FIRE will prompt readers to think deeply about the fragility of memory, the importance of stories, and the strength of the patterns that unite us all."

It’s clear that these inhabitants, despite sharing the same address, are little more than strangers to one another. But as Thubron delves deep into their pasts, it becomes apparent that these apartment dwellers have far more in common --- from their names to their family relationships to their preoccupations --- than any of them knew or even imagined. Those commonalities gesture toward one of the novel’s primary themes --- about the impossibility of truly knowing one another --- and also give the book a sort of heft, as it becomes clear that these people are not (just) well-formed characters but also are participating in a sort of allegory, one that is larger than any individual’s story.

Throughout the novel, Thubron’s background as a well-regarded travel writer shines through, especially in the opening chapter about the priest (which takes place partially in Greece and in war-torn Tanzania) and in the closing chapter about the aging traveler (who, one wonders, may be a stand-in for Thubron himself), whose luminous observations of the world and of the passing of time serve as the perfect capstone for the book.

Overwhelmingly, though, the novel returns again and again to the idea of memory and of our life’s stories: Where do they reside? How are they preserved? And what happens to them when we (and they) are gone? The ordinarily unsentimental neurosurgeon reflects on this at one point, considering what happens when the surgeries he performs to preserve or prolong life also destroy precious memories: “As for retrograde memory, the unique history buried in the individual brain, its loss was less easily assessed. In the altered mind of the post-operative patient, the past could slip away unnoticed. Whole stories remained buried alive, inaccessible in the labyrinth of the cortex.” Similarly, the landlord mourns the loss of even a handful of images lost when a projector destroys an aging and brittle filmstrip: “their celluloid inhabitants --- loved or forgotten --- were bitterly mortal. Their world could be destroyed by a pittance of glue, and each breakage was like a death.”

NIGHT OF FIRE will prompt readers to think deeply about the fragility of memory, the importance of stories, and the strength of the patterns that unite us all.