A World Made of Fire

"Mark Childress is an artist with an ear comparable to Eudora Welty's. I haven't read a Southern novel since Losing Battles that has given me such pleasure.? - Harper Lee. An extraordinary burst of praise greeted Mark Childress's enthralling first novel, "A World Made of Fire." Set in Alabama at the turn of the century, it tells the story of Callie Bates and her adoring children; the preacher-husband leaving in a buggy after the wedding and returning with spiteful sermons about the children Callie gives birth to year after year in his absence. It is the story of the secret visitor who is the radiant element of Callie's life; of the tragic Christmas Day of 1909; and of the children who survive it - Jacko, believed to have magical powers because he was saved from the fire in his mother's arms, and young Stella, blighted by the sorrow she has witnessed. The poetic, non-comic novel that launched the career of the author of "Crazy in Alabama" and "One Mississippi."