ROBERT KILLIAN-DAWSON

Robert Killian-Dawson was born in London and grew up in Australia and South East Asia, the backdrop for his novel The Right Thing to Do. He was educated at Marlborough College and the University of Southampton, where he studied Politics.

At various times he has worked as a radio journalist, a business writer and a photographer. He has been married to Reneé since 1997; together they have renovated several period houses, managed a rock’n’roll band and bred some rather fine miniature dachshunds.

They live with their three children on the east coast of the United States, in the historic South Carolina town of Beaufort, where Robert is currently working on his next novel.

BURNING FURY

A woman dressed like a bag lady shuffles onto the forecourt of a gas station in the North Carolina coastal town of Catherine, and fills a gallon canister with gasoline. She walks a quarter of a mile to the beach, where she douses the fuel over her body and sets herself alight.

When the charred woman is identified at the hospital, it turns out she is the schizophrenic mother of Alex Hutchinson, one of Catherine’s most famous sons. It was Alex and his rock’n’roll band, Burning Fury, who put this sleepy college town on the map and turned it into a regional cultural hub drawing in musicians, filmmakers, artists and wannabees from all over the country. Interrupting a world tour to see his mother before she dies, Alex then retreats to a vast mock Italianate villa overlooking the Atlantic Ocean.

In his grief Alex turns to Rachel, the one woman who knew him intimately when he was a regular sized person, before he became a rock star. The problem is, Rachel is married to Stuart, and having been burned once by Alex, she is extremely wary of having anything to do with him again. After all, her life is an enviable one: the loving husband with a successful business, the immaculately restored historic home, the picture perfect two daughters, the weekend lodge in the mountains, the cars, the boat… and yet… and yet…

Stuart, meanwhile, has his own demons. His own successes, though considerable, will always pale in comparison with Alex’s. Stuart’s curse was that he left the band for the security of his family’s restaurant business a few months before they were signed to a major label and rocketed into stardom.

As Alex descends upon this fragile couple, he starts to suck out of them the one thing he can’t buy – their normality. In the process he dredges up memories that were better left unstirred, sowing the seeds of his own discontent in Stuart and Rachel’s perfectly manicured garden.

Burning Fury takes a hard look at contemporary America, where the well-off have more stuff than almost anyone else in the world, but consume anti-depressants in equally vast quantities. Its central themes are envy, our obsession with celebrity and how we come to terms with our thwarted ambitions.

Rights available: World