To understand more, the author takes us back to Trinidad in the late 1960s where the five Rampersad sisters are alone after the death of their parents. The family are devastated by the death of Chevy but you instantly get the impression there are many issues – no-one really talks to each other, moving around the house around each other, rather than together and mostly keeping to themselves in their rooms. Already living in the house is the girl’s mother Leela and two of her sisters, Rani and Sangeetha.

The story is told from the point of view of Cassandra, his younger cousin who travels back from England for the funeral at her childhood home, where the family gather, along with her sisters Briony and Ce-Ce. Wild Fires is about the Rampersad family as they are all drawn back to the family home in Toronto to mourn the loss of Chevy. I do enjoy a good family drama and Wild Fires has plenty of family secrets and grievances that made for an engrossing read. Moving between Toronto and Trinidad, Wild Fires is a vivid and compelling story exploring the ways we mourn and why we avoid the very things that can save us. To Toronto and the big house on Florence Street, where her sisters are hiding more than themselves in their rooms, where the tension brewing between her mother and aunts has been decades in the making, and where sooner or later every secret, unspoken word and painful memory will find its way out into the open. When a call from one of her sisters brings Cassandra news of Chevy’s death, she has to return home for the funeral. The only things Cassandra knows about her family are the stories she’s heard in snatches over the years: about the aunt and cousin she never got to meet, about the man from the folded-up photograph in one of her aunt’s drawers, and of course about her cousin Chevy, and why he never speaks – but no one utters a word about them any more.

Grief is like an inside joke: you have to have been there to really get it.

Wild Fires by Sophie Jai