Fire

Freya Petrus is a thirty-six-year-old surgeon, gifted and renowned for her work with burn victims, saving lives on a near-daily basis. On the surface she lives a gilded existence, dancing entirely to her own tune, admired by colleagues and patients alike.

But Freya is haunted by the traumatic abuse she suffered the summer she was twelve years old, and the novel moves between her controlled present and the events that shaped her, asking how much of who she has become was forged by what was done to her. It is the darkest installment yet in John Boyne's Elements sequence, and gives away the endings of the earlier volumes, so is best read after Water and Earth.

Fire continues Boyne's examination of trauma, complicity, and survival with the same unflinching directness that has defined the series.