Night of Fire by Colin Thubron is the choice for this month’s Church Times Book Club — and on the podcast this week, the author is interviewed by Francis Martin (who has written this month’s Book Club essay about it).

Thubron is an acclaimed travel writer and novelist, whose eight novels and 11 works of non-fiction make up an oeuvre that transports readers around the globe, and deep into the human psyche. He is a former President of the Royal Society of Literature.

As well as talking about Night of Fire (synopsis below), the conversation explores the relationship between travel writing and fiction, faith and neuroscience, and the part played by doubt in the creative process.

The conversation was recorded at Colin Thubron’s home in west London.

This is the fourth Book Club podcast, a monthly series launched recently in association with the Church Times Festival of Faith and Literature. 

Night of Fire is published by Vintage at £8.99 (Church Times Bookshop £8.09). 

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Discuss this month’s book at facebook.com/groups/churchtimesbookclub

About Night of Fire: A fire spreads through a house, threatening to engulf the six tenants: a failed priest, an atheist neurosurgeon, and an obsessive photographer, along with a naturalist, a schoolboy, and a traveller. Each has lived a fascinating life, conjured in Thubron’s lyrical prose. But, as the inferno courses through the building, we start to notice inexplicable resonances between the lives of the tenants: motifs that recur and details that repeat, and that surely cannot all be explained as coincidence.

Click the play button above to listen to this podcast. You can also listen to the Church Times Podcast on the Church Times app for iPhone and iPad, SoundCloud, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, and most other podcast platforms. Music for the podcast is by Twisterium.