Cleave’s distraught protagonist, identified only by her nickname Petal, is a working-class housewife who loses her husband and only child in a terrorist-triggered chain of suicide bombs set off in an overflowing London soccer stadium.

Petal’s anguish is compounded because at the very moment her loved ones are blown to bits she is in the throes of adulterous carnal activity with a journalist she happened to encounter in a neighborhood pub only a day before. “All those fans that had been standing up to scream for the goal. Well. They were just gone.”

This is only the beginning of Cleave’s enthralling novel that takes readers on a journey frequently, and thankfully, punctuated by Petal’s wonderful dry wit. Cleave, a thirty-two year old former journalist and experimental psychology major at Oxford, writes with deceptive power moving from sheer horror to subtle and unnerving humor with an ease that only resembles real life. Cleave hits his stride especially when his book moves into the precarious machinations of the current War on Terror. Britain responds in part to the stadium bombings by suspending numerous barrage balloons over London. Each huge balloon has the smiling face of one of the bombing victims painted on it. Observes Petal, “They were called the Shield of Hope… When the wind blew it screamed in the balloon’s cables and the noise made the hairs stand up on your neck. That was my boy’s only voice now, Osama.”

Quips one high-ranking official to Petal, “It’s an ugly war and there’s no honour in it. But we will win because we have to. It’s a war we will win by ditching our principles. By interning people who are high risk. By listening to private phone calls. And it’s a boring war too. A workaday war.”

Incendiary, completed before the recent London bombings, is a brilliantly conceived book that uncannily captures the impact of terrorism on everyday working-class life. Without doubt, readers will eagerly anticipate Cleave’s next venture into fiction.

H.P. Albarelli Jr. divides his time between Florida, Vermont and London. His first novel, ‘The Heap,’ was published in 2005.

© 2005 Laura Hird All rights reserved.