Bestselling author of The Beekeeper of Aleppo, Christy Lefteri on learning to write what she feels, the power of storytelling and how happiness is found in a Greek deli on the Piccadilly Line.

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Christy Lefteri is the award-winning author of The Beekeeper of Aleppo, which has sold over a million copies worldwide and has been published in 40 countries. The Book of Fire is her spellbinding third novel. In this conversation we talk about how dry statistics are humans with the tears dried off, but storytelling has the power to grab our hearts…
The Book of Fire...

This morning, I met the man who started the fire. He did something terrible, but then, so have I. I left him. I left him and now he may be dead.
Once upon a time there was a beautiful village that held a million stories of love and loss and peace and war, and it was swallowed up by a fire that blazed up to the sky. The fire ran all the way down to the sea where it met with its reflection.
A family from two nations, England and Greece, live a simple life in a tiny Greek village: Irini, Tasso and their daughter, lovely, sweet Chara, whose name means joy. Their life goes up in flames in a single day when one man starts a fire out of greed and indifference. Many are killed, homes are destroyed, and the region's natural beauty wiped out.
In the wake of the fire, Chara bears deep scars across her back and arms. Tasso is frozen in trauma, devastated that he wasn't there when his family most needed him. And Irini is crippled by guilt at her part in the fate of the man who started the fire.
But this family has survived, and slowly green shoots of hope and renewal will grow from the smouldering ruins of devastation.
Once again, Christy Lefteri has crafted a novel which is intimate and epic, sweeping and delicate. The Book of Fire explores not only the damage wrought by human folly, and the costs of survival in our changing world, but also - and ultimately - our powers of redemption and renewal.

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