The Fire Thief

Set in the 1960s, The Fire Thief is the story of Sonny Wheeler, who grew up in a time of '50s conformity that exploded into revolution, protest, and days of rage for many of his generation. When his mother remarries, teenaged Sonny moves with his new family to Danforth, Washington, a city that exists solely because of the nuclear power plant humming at its core. This is the Cold War at its height: his stepfather is a nuclear engineer, his home is visited every month by FBI agents looking for Soviet spies, and the daughter of high school science teached is named Marie Curie. Sonny's ony connection to the world outside this stifling city is his wild Aunt Alice, a lounge club singer who rejects all of the social norms of the age. Having fallen in love with the angst-ridden Karen, Sonny follows her descent into radicalism and joins the Weathermen, a revolutionary group dedicated to the overthrow of the state and the atomic utopia their parents had created. After staging the theft of pl