This week’s other featured books, “On Traigh Lar Beach,” by Dianne Ebertt Beaff, “Memories in the Drift,” by Melissa Payne and “Camp Winnapooka,” by Scott Laudati, can be found by scrolling down below this post, or by clicking the author’s name on our Authors page.
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THE BOOK: The Fire in His Wake
PUBLISHED IN: 2020
THE AUTHOR: Spencer Wolff
THE EDITOR: Nyuol Lueth Tong (http://www.livingstoriescollective.com/interviews/2017/2/16/ic69cm2vihrrhom85n0le9sf4eacb4)
THE PUBLISHER: McSweeney’s Publishing is an American non-profit publishing house founded by editor Dave Eggers in 1998, headquartered in San Francisco. McSweeney’s initially published only the literary journal Timothy McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, but has grown to publish novels, books of poetry, and other periodicals.
SUMMARY: The Fire in His Wake tells the story of two men swept up in refugee crises of the twenty-first century: Simon, a young employee at the UNHCR in Morocco, and Arès, a Congolese locksmith left for dead in the wake of ethnic violence. In search of a better future, Arès embarks on an epic journey across northern Africa with Europe as his goal. He reaches Rabat, Morocco, where he joins a desperate community of exiles fighting for survival in a hostile land. While Arès risks everything to make it to Spain, Simon gradually awakens to a subterranean world of violence that threatens his comfortable expat life and fledgling romance with a Moroccan singer. Part colorful portrait of life in the Maghreb, part astonishing tale of hope and perseverance, The Fire in his Wake carries the reader from the inner sanctums of the UN to the hazardous realities faced by the refugees in the streets and on their risky crossings to Europe.
When a storm gathers at the UNHCR, and the ghosts of the Congo’s violence surface in Rabat, the two men find themselves on a collision course, setting the stage for the novel’s unforgettable and genre-busting ending. Eye-opening, suspenseful, and full of unexpected humor, Spencer Wolff brings his personal experiences as an aid worker to this unforgettable story of two remarkable individuals.
THE BACK STORY: On July 27, 2009 a group of some sixty refugees, armed with rocks and makeshift weapons, assaulted the UN refugee bureau (UNHCR) in Rabat, Morocco. Windows were shattered, guards and police injured, security cameras smashed to the ground. Eventually the Moroccan army was forced to intervene. Those of us who were in the building that day barely escaped with our lives.
“In the wake of the attack, I felt compelled to tell the story behind that tragic event, to explain how and why a group of refugees would storm the very institution sworn to defend them. However, the idea for a novel began well before that day.”
“For weeks, hundreds of refugees had camped out in front of the UNHCR, demanding that they be resettled in Europe. The protests were aggressive, with pounding drums and veiled threats, and as tensions heightened, I began to note down conversations within the building and without. I recorded my interactions with the refugees and I took general notes on Rabat and the rich diversity of characters I encountered in the city.”
“The first draft of the novel took me three years to write, and it took another year to find an agent willing to represent it (with immense gratitude to Celeste Fine previously of Sterling Lord Literistics and now at Park & Fine). Multiple revisions followed. Over the ensuing years, I continued to elaborate the plot. I am a great fan of adventure novels, from The Odyssey to The Count of Monte Cristo, and whatever humanitarian sentiments initially gave birth to my writing, I wanted to make sure to produce a gripping narrative that would be impossible to put down.
WHY THIS TITLE?: The title of the novel, The Fire in His Wake, comes from the self-aggrandizing moniker adopted by the Congo’s long-time, kleptocratic dictator, Joseph Désiré Mobutu. In 1972, after changing the name of the country to Zaire, he adopted the official title: Mobutu Sese Seko Nkuku Ngbendu Wa Za Banga or “The all-powerful warrior who, because of his endurance and inflexible will to win, goes from conquest to conquest, leaving fire in his wake.”
Thanks to Mobutu’s legendary corruption, Zaire fell into ruins and repeatedly erupted with ethnic strife. Eventually, this led to civil war and a total collapse. In 1997, Mobutu fled Kinshasa for Morocco, but, as his official name promised, he left several fires burning in his wake, above all, a mass exodus of refugees that escaped their shattered country amidst widespread violence.
WHY WOULD SOMEONE WANT TO READ IT? The novel should appeal to anyone interested in themes of migration, human rights, refugees, the United Nations, and African history (especially the Democratic Republic of Congo and Morocco). Still, I want to emphasize that The Fire in His Wake is a classic adventure tale in which two young men’s destinies collide on the dramatic stage of world history. The plot is action-packed. Moreover, even if Arès’ narrow escape from death, and his numerous attempts to break into Europe, by boat across the Mediterranean, or through the barriers at the Spanish enclave of Melilla, might have been ripped from yesterday’s headlines, the novel goes beyond the news, asking universal questions about finding one’s place in the world, and about how to cope with the tragedies of the past.
Finally, without trying to lessen the specific plight of the refugees depicted in the narrative, I do believe that we can all relate to the novel’s characters as we nervously orient ourselves towards an unfamiliar future, hardly imaginable a year ago. If there is one invaluable lesson that many refugees can teach us, it is how to be infinitely adaptable when life goes suddenly awry.
REVIEW COMMENTS:
“There is not a page of “The Fire in His Wake” that is not skillfully written and compelling… an utterly successful first novel, one that sports a flair for harrowing adventure matched with a complex political conscience… it is not too early to say Mr. Wolff’s novel will be one of the best debuts of the year.”
—The East Hampton Star
“The Fire in His Wake is a work of extraordinary empathetic and imaginative power. With a lot of heart, and in vivid prose, Spencer Wolffhas done that brave and difficult—and ever more rare—thing we most need our novelists to do: painstakingly imagine himself into lives and circumstances starkly different than his own. It is an astonishing debut.”
—Thomas Chatterton Williams, author of Self-Portrait in Black and White
“A devastating and infuriating story written with compassion, style, and grace. Beyond the harrowing depictions of torture and war, this chilling tale of a heartbreaking life is, at its core, a struggle to come to terms with something much worse: the maddening hypocrisy at our borders, the violence that Western powers inflict on the stories of refugees who arrive at their doors.”
—Dina Nayeri, author of The Ungrateful Refugee
AUTHOR PROFILE: Spencer Wolff is an award-winning documentary filmmaker and journalist based in Paris, France. His work focuses primarily on diaspora, migration and racial justice and has previously appeared in The Guardian, The New York Times and Time, among others. He is the recipient of an Overseas Press Club Award for his work at The New York Times, and his feature-length documentary, STOP premiered at DOC NYC and was awarded a Silver Gavel by the American Bar Association, honoring work in media and the arts that helps foster the American public’s understanding of law and society. His first novel, The Fire in His Wake (McSweeney’s 2020) is based on his experiences working at the UN Refugee Bureau (UNHCR) in Rabat, Morocco in 2009.
A native New Yorker, he is an avid traveler with a love of languages. Since he was a child, he has dreamed of being a writer. You can find out more about him at his website: www.spencerwolff.com
AUTHOR COMMENTS: Here’s where you can perhaps tie your book to some larger issue, or what you hoped to accomplish.
In his introduction to galley version of the novel, my editor, Nyuol Lueth Tong, offered reflections on The Fire in His Wake that do better justice to this topic than anything I could write myself:
“Spencer Wolff has written a dazzling first novel about a Congolese refugee who flees to Rabat, Morocco and finds himself caught up in the dramatic struggle between a desperate community of exiles and the very institution meant to defend them: the UNHCR. It is splendidly ambitious both in narrative scope and formal innovation, especially for a debut. Above all, and for our purposes here, it addresses pressing themes of our times – migration, human rights, and the refugee crisis – in a gripping, and immersive narrative that at times reads like a thriller. A journalist and documentarist by trade, Wolff has a filmmaker’s aesthetic for pacing and drama, and he has populated his astonishing debut with colorful personalities and exciting twists and turns. As its editor, one of the pressing aims was making sure that the diversity and complexity of the worlds explored here, their contradictions and points of connection, were registered at the level of the work’s inner structure. From the sensory richness of the descriptions, and the realistic depth of the characters, you can feel that the writer has lived through these experiences and has treated them with maturity and openness.” – Nyuol Lueth Tong
SAMPLE CHAPTER:
Literary Hub published an excerpt that I am particularly fond of and which can be found here: https://lithub.com/the-fire-in-his-wake/
You can also read the first few chapters of the novel on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Fire-His-Wake-Spencer-Wolff/dp/1944211896
LOCAL OUTLETS:
WHERE ELSE TO BUY IT:
McSweeney’s Publishing: https://store.mcsweeneys.net/products/the-fire-in-his-wake
Bookshop: https://bookshop.org/books/the-fire-in-his-wake/9781944211899
Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Fire-His-Wake-Spencer-Wolff/dp/1944211896
Barnes and Nobles: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-fire-in-his-wake-spencer-wolff/1132900644?ean=9781944211899
PRICE: $28, but only $26 at Bookshop!
CONTACT THE AUTHOR:
Please feel free to reach out to me at spencer.wolff@gmail.com
Twitter: @spencerwwolff
Instagram: spencerwwolff
Facebook: facebook.com/spencer.wolff2
Snowflakes in a Blizzard 