Incendiary

A working-class woman in London loses her four-year-old son and her husband when suicide bombers attack a soccer match. In her grief she sits down and writes a letter to Osama bin Laden. She wants to persuade him to give up his campaign of terror, and she tries to do it by showing him what the attack has done to her life.

The bombing is only the start of her trouble. Security measures turn London into something close to an occupied city, and she feels besieged along with it. At first she fights back, taking a civilian job with the police to help the antiterrorist effort.

Then she becomes involved with an upper-class couple. Through them she is drawn into a tangle of guilt, ambition and cynicism that wears away her trust in the society she is helping to defend.

When a new bomb threat throws the city into panic, she is pushed toward acts of extreme desperation, which may be her only chance of surviving. The novel is told in the first person as a single letter, so the whole book is her voice, raw and direct, and the mood is bleak and urgent.