A radiant, razor-sharp debut about faith, obsession, and the fine line between devotion and destruction.
In The Incendiaries, R.O. Kwon crafts a haunting literary puzzle of a novel centered on a young woman’s descent into a cult and the man who desperately tries to pull her back. Phoebe Lin is a dazzling, damaged student at an elite university, reeling from the loss of her mother. When she meets Will Kendall, a former evangelical with secrets of his own, they become entwined in an intense romance shadowed by loss, longing, and unresolved trauma.
As Phoebe drifts toward a secretive extremist group led by charismatic cult leader John Leal, her disappearance leaves Will unraveling both her past and his own. Kwon’s prose is lyrical and compact, her storytelling surgical in its dissection of love, grief, and the hunger for meaning in a fractured world.
❤️ Why You’ll Love It
🔥 Compact and Powerful: At under 250 pages, it delivers the emotional intensity of a much longer novel—perfect for readers who crave a quick but resonant read.
💔 Emotionally Layered: Tackles loss, guilt, and the elusive nature of truth with poetic force.
🧠 Philosophical & Psychological: Delves deep into questions of faith, identity, and fanaticism.
✍️ Literary Prose: R.O. Kwon’s writing is elegant, compressed, and often breathtaking in its clarity.
🔎 Unreliable Narrators & Narrative Gaps: Fans of fractured storytelling will love piecing together the truths between perspectives.
 
🎯 Perfect For
Readers drawn to literary fiction with psychological and philosophical undertones
Fans of college-campus dramas with a darker twist
Anyone intrigued by the dynamics of cults, radicalization, and religion
Readers of short, potent novels that unpack big ideas
📚 Fans of The Incendiaries may also like:
My Dark Vanessa by Kate Elizabeth Russell
The Girls by Emma Cline
The Secret History by Donna Tartt
Conversations with Friends by Sally Rooney
Trust Exercise by Susan Choi
Everything I Never Told You by Celeste Ng