“Dazzling….”
“The Fire in His Wake is a work of extraordinary empathetic and imaginative power. With a lot of heart, and in vivid prose, Spencer Wolff has done that brave and difficult—and ever more rare—thing we most need our novelists to do: painstakingly imagine himself into lives and circumstances starkly different than his own. It is an astonishing debut.”
—Thomas Chatterton Williams, author of Self-Portrait in Black and White
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“There is not a page of “The Fire in His Wake” that is not skillfully written and compelling… an utterly successful first novel, one that sports a flair for harrowing adventure matched with a complex political conscience… it is not too early to say Mr. Wolff’s novel will be one of the best debuts of the year.”
—The East Hampton Star
“After I barely escaped from a dramatic assault on the UNHCR in Rabat, Morocco that left dozens wounded, I began writing THE FIRE IN HIS WAKE. It recounts the story of a young refugee who took part in that attack, but it is also a classic adventure tale in which two young men’s destinies collide on the dramatic stage of world history. I think that we can all relate to its characters as we nervously orient ourselves towards an unfamiliar future, hardly imaginable a year ago, but which is not without its own seeds of hope. If there is one invaluable lesson that many refugees can teach us, it is how to be infinitely adaptable when life goes suddenly awry.
In this moment of gingerly loosening lockdowns, I am proud to present you with a novel about a man trapped in “the open-air prison that is Rabat.” Fiction has always been a sort of prison-break for me, as well as a window onto another world, and I hope that my readers find THE FIRE IN HIS WAKE equally transporting and entertaining and that they take from it a renewed sense of wonder in their fellow man and a deeper faith in their own resilience. ”
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“A dazzling first novel about a Congolese refugee…The Fire in His Wake addresses pressing themes of our times—migration, human rights, and the refugee crisis. Splendidly ambitious both in narrative scope and formal innovation….”
“A devastating and infuriating story written with compassion, style, and grace. Beyond the harrowing depictions of torture and war, this chilling tale of a heartbreaking life is, at its core, a struggle to come to terms with something much worse: the maddening hypocrisy at our borders, the violence that Western powers inflict on the stories of refugees who arrive at their doors.”
—Dina Nayeri, author of The Ungrateful Refugee
“At this dark hour of shuttered borders and hearts, can the novel still expose a human truth that finds no footing in statistics or news reports? With incandescent lyricism and wry fury, Spencer Wolff’s The Fire in His Wake builds to its remarkable answer: only by confronting the existential fullness of today’s refugees, migrants, and so many abandoned aspirants—the picaresque comedy alongside the tragedy—can we see that it is those of us living in the shadow of fences and walls who are truly adrift."
—Greg Jackson, author of Prodigals: Stories
