An apocalyptic fire consumes Alex Mann’s hometown in New Mexico. His father and his best friend are both killed in the disaster, leaving him with a harrowing secret about his role in their deaths. Scarred in mind and body, he embarks on a protean struggle to recreate himself. His journey is rife with embers of despair and guilt that reveal facets of a Mann he never knew. Memory, he discovers, can be both a mage and a sage whose sleight of hand unmoors time in the brine of imagination.
The refuge of an idyllic alpine town promises to heal Alex’s wounds and restore him through friendship until he himself ignites a scourge. Expelled and desperate, he is granted unforeseen absolution by an aging alcoholic with a savage past, who sets Alex on a course to reconciliation with himself that ultimately illumines his true calling.
Pivotal to Mann’s odyssey are the challenges and wisdom created by his relationships with desire, shame, forgiveness, and ultimately, the love of friends—above all, his extraordinary cat, Tiger, who salvages and reclaims him at the nadir. The living and dead serve as a reckoning force, striving to lead Mann from the mire of blame to the grace of responsibility.
Memory’s Fire takes its hat off to Kent Haruf, gives a nod to Hunter S. Thompson, a bow to T. S. Eliot, a handshake to Annie Proulx, and embraces Mary Shelley and Rainer Maria Rilke as spirit kin. This classical coming-of-age pedigree offers fertile terrain for crashing together the words and ideas of canonical literary figures with the poetry of a millennial pot-farmer.