Like fire unbound
Out Now!
'Petherick's London is fascinating and engaging. His writing borders on the breathtaking.' - John Bird, founder of The Big Issue
'A slow burn in its purest form - Petherick's fiery prose evokes a city smouldering with impassioned tensions that build towards an incendiary denouncement.' - Jake Arnott, author of The Long Firm
London is experiencing a heatwave in the summer of 2018. A disparate cast of characters are drawn together under the gaze of a mysterious mystic as they try their best to survive in the new contemporary capital, a city of changing rules, privatised streets, gig economies, fractured traditions.
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As the heat beats down upon them day after day, they each attempt differing strategies to maintain their place, to protect their futures, and somehow to forge a way though the challenge of the day. And reaching across the centuries is the story of Lily Cadyman, trying to survive in the heaving city: scraping by as maid to Thomas Farriner, whose bakery in Pudding Lane was the source of the first flames which caused the Great Fire of 1666.
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Like Fire Unbound is a novel about survival, where the city itself emerges as a character alongside all the others: essentially democratic, an egalitarian like our cast who struggle to maintain their integrity in the early years of the twenty-first century, and a transformative year of the seventeenth.
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Like Fire Unbound weaves together the London of that terrifying summer of 1666 and the London of 2018, sweltering under a dizzying heat, building towards a seemingly inevitable crescendo.