Fire in Heaven

Not many novels come so fraught with emotional, intellectual and historical drama as this continuation of Bosse's bestselling Asian saga, which began with The Warlord. The story is set mainly in 1948, year of Gandhi's assassination and Communist victory in China. Philip Embreeveteran of the recent war in Burma who 20 years previously was attached to the army of a brilliant Chinese general whom he betrayed for love of the general's Russian mistress, Veraleaves India, where he had gone to heal his spiritual wounds, for a journey of emotional stock-taking. He returns to Burma, to Thailand (where he rejoins Vera, whom he had deserted there) and finally to China, now in the last agony of civil war, in order to retrieve Vera's daughter Sonia (with whom he falls in love) and revisit the city where the general had been headquartered. Bosse has written a story of impressive richness and intensity that not only depicts with an expert's understanding an Asia caught in convulsive change, but does so through the private dramas of a half-dozen characters who are not easy to forget. Paperback rights to Bantam. February 7