Philadelphia Fire

In 1985 police bombed a West Philadelphia row house. Eleven people died and a fire started that destroyed sixty other houses. John Edgar Wideman brings these events and their repercussions to shocking life in this seminal novel.At the heart of Philadelphia Fire is Cudjoe, a writer and exile who returns to his old neighbourhood and who becomes obsessed with the search for a lone survivor of the event, a young boy seen running from the flames.One of Wideman’s most ambitious and celebrated works, Philadelphia Fire is about race, life and survival in urban America.

Reviews of Philadelphia Fire

A passionate, angry and formally fascinating novel of urban disintegration * * New York Times * * Philadelphia Fire isn't a book you read so much as one you breathe * * San Francisco Chronicle * * A pyrotechnic display . . . Wideman's writing, like Toni Morrison's, is so pure and convincing that he can break the rules of classical storytelling, even invent some new ones * * Boston Globe * * Reminiscent of Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man * * Time * * Philadelphia Fire delivers its message with a careening momentum and astonishing precision . . . Wideman has made fire his own, and there are fire figures everywhere, illuminating us and driving us back with heat and smoky confusion * * Los Angeles Times * * Wideman astonishes us . . . insisting on our attention by the very daring of his prose and the authority with which he proceeds * * Philadelphia Inquirer * * In incantatory, lyrical, naturalistic and inventive prose, Wideman writes of sex and race and life in the city, with all the beauty, profane humour and literary complexity of Joyce writing about Dublin * * Publishers Weekly * * A tale of survival in which the author himself finds redemption in his art. With its dark and cynical humor, this metafiction will disturb as many readers as it dazzles * * Kirkus Reviews * * There is a very obvious reason why John Edgar Wideman is one of America's most celebrated authors: he is very good * * Washington Post * * A profound writer — RICHARD FORD