Air & Fire (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9780679747307)

In the 1890s, "Lower California" is a land adrift, peopled by Indians and half-breeds, and now by the French as well. The Indians are indifferent to Western notions of time and industry. The French, on the other hand, are sufficiently meticulous to import 2,348 pieces of cast iron to the desolate mining town of Santa Sofia, there to be assembled into a church under the supervision of a disciple of the renowned Gustave Eiffel.

This wildly impractical venture is the starting premise for this new novel by the author of The Five Gates of Hell, a writer the Washington Post has called "a virtuoso of the hallucinatory." As Theophile Valence attempts to re-create Paris in an outpost of hell--and his wife, Suzanne, arouses the doomed passions of an American prospector and a Mexican army officer--Air and Fire fuses adventure and romance into a magnificent tale of conflicting passions and cultures.

"Absorbing . . . More than anything else, it is the prose oin which Thomson evokes his character's] mental life that, with the concentration of a magnifying glass, kindles this novel's fire."--The New Yorker

Author: Rupert Thomson
ISBN-10: 0679747303
ISBN-13: 9780679747307
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Language: English
Published: 05/30/1995
Pages: 320
Format: Paperback
Weight: 0.94lbs
Size: 8.43h x 5.68w x 0.83d

Review Citation(s):
New York Times 07/30/1995 pg. 20
Publishers Weekly 05/08/1995