Songs for the Flames

Being economical with the truth allows a photographer to understand something of which she would have preferred to have remained ignorant. A chance meeting at a regimental reunion obliges a veteran of the Korean War to confront his past. A walk-on part in a Polanski film finds the narrator searching the director’s face for signs of the aftermath of Sharon Tate’s murder. The internet search for a book published in 1887, leads a writer to discover the life of a passionate woman. The characters in ‘Songs for the Flames’ are men and women touched by violence – sometimes directly, sometimes only tangentially – but whose lives are changed forever by an unexpected encounter or by the operation of incomprehensible forces.