Flames

Flames is a novel by the Australian author Robbie Arnott, first published in 2018 and his debut. It follows the siblings Levi and Charlotte McAllister, who react to their mother's death in very different ways.

Their mother, Edith, comes back. She returns two days after the ashes are spread in Notley Fern Gorge, unresponsive to her children, and walks to their father Jack's house, where she immolates herself on the front lawn.

Charlotte grows increasingly paranoid that the same thing may happen to her, and Levi decides that the answer is to build her a coffin strong enough that she will not be able to return after burial. Each chapter of the novel is written from a different character's perspective. The coffin is the project he sets himself, and it takes up more of his life than he expected it to. and the two of them are left to work out what to do about it.

The book is a work of magical realism whose shape comes from the Tasmanian landscape, and the journey it describes crosses the southern island and comes back round to where it started.