Fire Flowers

August, 1945. Japan has been defeated in the Second World War. The country lies in ruins. Satsuko Takara and her teenage brother, Hiroshi, have lost their parents, and each other, during the firestorm that devastated Tokyo five months before. Hal Lynch, a haunted U.S. reconnaissance photographer, is now a photojournalist in Japan, where he stumbles upon a shocking story and is determined to bring it to light. And Osamu Maruki, a dissolute writer and once Satsuko’s beloved, has returned from the South Pacific a broken and changed man. As these characters’ stories spin out and converge, the war-torn streets of Tokyo come alive in this dazzlingly observed novel. Cinematic, brutal, yet beautiful, Fireflies powerfully portrays the shock, the struggles, and the difficult choices that arise from the destruction of war.