The Burning Girl

Canadian Phillips's challenging first novel, a dense literary fantasy, requires two readings—first to appreciate the sensuous prose, second to get some idea of the plot. On release from the hospital, Ryder "Rye" Coleman has inexplicable cuts and scars all over her body that sometimes open when she feels feverish, making her bleed. She also suffers from synesthesia and amnesia. When Rye follows a man home after he saves her life in an alley, he provides her with a fantastic explanation for all the strangeness: a refugee from another world persuaded the two of them to help foil a plot to conquer Earth, then betrayed them. Rye soon discovers that she has the unique power to travel from world to world, though she can't control it—and that makes her valuable to the people in the alley, who kidnap her and her savior, Bardo, an ex-cop with secrets of his own. Rye's fevered, synesthesiac dreams create an internal world as vivid as the book's external world, though it's often hard to tell them apart. Phillips is also the author of a story collection, In the Palace of Repose (2005). (June)