When Chris Cleave’s debut novel Incendiary was first published in 2005, it garnered much critical attention and unwarranted notoriety. Incendiary tells the story of a fictive Al Qaeda suicide attack on London, in which the narrator, an unnamed Cockney woman, loses both her husband and small son. In a macabre twist of coincidence, the book was scheduled for release on the very same day, 7 July 2005, that four suicide bombers detonated their devices on the London Underground and on a bus, killing more than fifty people and injuring hundreds more. This coincidence heightened the shock value of the book’s controversial set-up: Incendiary is a kind of epistolary novel, beginning with the words “Dear Osama”, in which the distraught female narrator mourns the death of her loved ones and tries to piece her life back...
1309 words
Citation: Tancke, Ulrike. "Incendiary". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 09 March 2010 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=28524, accessed 10 June 2026.]
