Chris Cleave’s debut novel Incendiary—winner of the Book-of-the-Month Club’s First Fiction Award and the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize—is sure to captivate the same people who made Little Bee one of the most talked-about novels of the last decade.

I am a woman built upon the wreckage of myself.

In an emotionally raw voice alive with grief, compassion, and startling humor, a woman mourns the loss of her husband and son at the hands of one of history’s most notorious criminals. And in appealing to their executioner, she reveals the desperate sadness of a broken heart and a working-class life blown apart.