A dazzling novel of exile, art, and the mysteries of the afterlife, from National Book Award Finalist Hamid Ismailov
At the funeral of their late teacher, a group of elderly dance students gather to piece together the little they knew about her. Who was the woman they called Faya—“Fire”? Where had she come from, and why? As her ghost looks on from the smoke of the crematorium, the shape of a remarkable life slowly emerges: a grandfather whose book of demons Faya could not forget; years dancing ballet in Budapest; a son, imprisoned and embittered, turning to mysticism to uncover the family history he was never told.
Structured like a sequence of group dances, Fire Dances choreographs the tragic arc of Faya’s life of displacement. Moving across centuries and continents, from a sixteenth-century Central Asian workshop to a Soviet ballet school, and from the conflagrations of this life to the flames of the next, this journey of the imagination is a tribute to the lives and memories forged in the crucible of exile—and to the many ways that cultural and religious identities can spin across the stage, take miraculous leaps, and land in unexpected places.