Book summary

Adrift in the cultural morass of East Los Angeles, Black, a guerrilla artist, grapples with his cultural heritage, religious beliefs, and sexual yearnings. His El Salvadoran mother blamed her own deadly cancer on having Black out of wedlock. His Nigerian father, who disappeared during a secret NASA space mission, believed that an evil Igbo spirit would kill all his male children before they were six years old, and as a result Black was dressed as a girl until the age of seven. Now, deeply troubled by his past, Black surrounds himself with a motley assembly of freaks and misfits: a former child soldier from Rwanda, a Jewish psychic who becomes a surrogate mother, a self-mutilating tattoo artist, a junkie dwarf, and Sweet Girl, the transvestite stripper with whom Black falls in love. Chris Abani, an award-winning poet (KALAKUTA REPUBLIC) and novelist (GRACELAND), has delved deep into the teeming underbelly of Los Angeles, and THE VIRGIN OF FLAMES drives towards its hallucinatory climax with the same fierce madness as Nathanael West's THE DAY OF THE LOCUST.

Media reviews

"[A]n antic atmosphere that recalls Pirandello."