The Burning City - Hardcover

A startlingly original teenage novel from the internationally acclaimed author of DEATH AND THE MAIDEN. Heller is delivering messages in Manhattan's melting-pot of immigrants. Swerving through the city streets on his bike, he's carrying heartbreak and hope from around the world - and feeling it himself...As Heller reaches his 16th birthday in the long hot summer preceding September 11th, he confronts the timeless perplexities that have left older adults confused since the beginning of time. Unrequited love, state indifference and family dynamics form the background to a fast-paced, moving and unusual novel for teenage and adult readers.

A very high profile writer for adults, Ariel Dorfman is an exile from the Pinochet regime in Chile, the child of Holocaust refugees. He has written several well-known plays about repression and dictatorship, including DEATH AND THE MAIDEN (filmed by Roman Polanski). His last novel, THE NANNY AND THE ICEBERG, was published in the UK in Autumn 1999 and was very widely and well reviewed in the broadsheets. Joaquin Dorfman, born in 1979, opened his first play at the Edinburgh Festival at the age of nineteen. He now lives in Brooklyn, New York, where he has just finished his second novel, Through the Ordinary World. The Dorfmans have also written two screenplays together.