Nowhere Burning, the sixth novel by American-born, UK-based thriller writer Catriona Ward, is told from different character perspectives – a device Ward also used in The Last House On Needless Street, published in 2021. But whereas …Needless Street gripped me from the start, her latest offering doesn’t quite have the same impact.
The novelopens with 14-year-old Riley and her younger brother escaping to the mysterious Nowhere. Ward’s descriptions are vivid, sometimes visceral, and the setting is captivating – although chapter one feels overly long, with little action, and it takes another hundred pages or so before Nowhere Burning begins to liven up.
This isn’t a comfortable read and some events are horrific, though the present-tense narration and split timeline hold the reader at a distance and dilute the tension.Ward likes to withhold information, which worked in …Needless Street due to the nature of the main character; here, it feels manipulative and results in several info dumps where the author endeavours to fill in the gaps.
With a surplus of threads, none offering a satisfactory conclusion, Nowhere Burning isn’t sure if it’s a horror, mystery, or fairytale. Allusions to Peter Pan are both obvious and out of place, and some suspension of disbelief is needed. The lack of foreshadowing gives the impression that Ward made the story up as she went along and the ending is so far out of left field it could belong to a different book. Nowhere Burning is a story with great potential; with more rigorous editorial input, it could have been crafted into something more cohesive.
