ABOUT THE NOVEL

FIRES OF THE FALLEN WORLD

In Fires of the Fallen World the lyrical torque of Shann Ray’s prose escalates scene to scene, across generations and cultures, across continents and time, and creates a dreamlike intensity that defines the subtleties of human isolation and vulnerability, quietness, discovery, and love.  He names how fragile we are, capturing the imagination in a world of earth, sky, and stars, and speaking to the fortification and desperation that accompanies human atrocity, as well as the courage of the individual and collective will to forgive even in the face of the profane.
 
Fires of the Fallen World is a work of imagistic beauty, sweeping in scope, deft and stylistic, luminous with love for people, landscape, and the nature of the sacred.  With excerpts published in some of the country’s leading literary magazines (including McSweeney’s, Narrative Magazine, and StoryQuarterly), the novel places the fragmentation of life in the context of a unified narrative and considers human frailty in the light of grace.