"Perhaps when I die, whether by assassin's bullet or by some natural end, I will float free of my body and come into the blessed light of eternal repose beside my Maker. But in my heart I do not believe it to be so: I know that in truth the world is only like a house afire, a frantic and terminal farce from which no doorway leads and of which no record remains." from I AWOKE IN A HOUSE AFIRE Orphaned at age five, when his anarchist parents are executed for treason, Rousseau travels through life buffeted by chance. Along the way he is deified and damned, imprisoned and exalted, welcomed and exiled. Through these trials he comes to believe that the world is like a house afire: a terminal farce into which everyone is born and of which everyone must make some reckoning while the walls collapse around him. In the tradition of Swift's Gulliver's Travels and Kafka's America comes a novel that is at once a window onto our own world and a funhouse mirror reflection of it, a portrait and a caricature, at once profoundly funny and deeply unsettling. Written by Orhan Miloshe Cover design by Tom Maven