Winner - 1991 Pen/Faulkner Award
"One of America's premier writers of fiction" (New York Times) gives readers his most ambitious and highly praised work of fiction. Based on the 1985 bombing by police of a West Philadelphia row house owned by an Afrocentric cult.

Publisher Comments

From "one of America's premier writers of fiction" (New York Times) comes this novel inspired by the 1985 police bombing of a West Philadelphia row house owned by the back-to-nature, Afrocentric cult known as Move. The bombing killed eleven people and started a fire that destroyed sixty other houses. At the center of the story is Cudjoe, a writer and exile who returns to his old neighborhood after spending a decade fleeing from his past, and his search for the lone survivor of the fire — a young boy who was seen running from the flames. An impassioned, brutally honest journey through the despair and horror of life in urban America, "Philadelphia Fire isn't a book you read so much as one you breathe" (San Francsisco Chronicle).