THE FIRE BY NIGHT

THE FIRE BY NIGHT is a visceral, powerful story of two heroic military nurses working on the frontlines of WWII. Weaving the dual narratives of Jo, stationed in Europe and Kay, in the South Pacific, each character has a divergent experience but both find themselves victims of war.

While the novel has the rich period detail and powerful realism of a classic WWII novel, it carves a unique and appealing place apart by foregrounding two courageous women working right in the middle of the action in two distinctive and less well-explored settings.

Jo refuses to abandon her six patients on the front who are battling to stay alive in a makeshift medical unit. One in particular, a Scottish soldier, has taken root in her heart, but she has witnessed so much brutality her emotions are not to be trusted and she tries to close herself off to the possibility of love.

Kay, having enjoyed the glittering social pleasures of Pearl Harbor and fallen in love has her newly-married world smashed to pieces with the bombing and is taken as a POW for several torturous years. She struggles to maintain not only her sanity but her health as the camp conditions deteriorate under Japanese oppression.

Both women find meaning and salvation in their nursing professions and struggle postwar to find their place-- and find love-- in the world. Routinely, WWII narratives do not address the role women had in the trenches. With muscular prose and rich, superbly researched detail, Manidis has written a novel that shines a light on these brave women who devoted themselves to the care of others during an unspeakable and yet relentlessly fascinating part of history. Readers will be hard-pressed to find another novel that tackles this subject in such a unique and powerful way.

This is Teresa Manidis’ first novel, all the more impressive for her being a self-taught writer who spent 15 years as a midwife and is now retraining to be a physician. She combines a love of writing with a relentless study of women’s role in WWII, and she's gone to extraordinary lengths to research this novel, from interviewing WWII military nurses who served at the frontlines (who were sworn to secrecy for 60 years after the end of the war) to participating in WWII reenactments herself in order to get access to the medical equipment of the period. She has been published in New Oxford Review, Shape Magazine's Fit Pregnancy and the medical Journal of the ICEA. Graduating with a bachelor’s degree in English in 1994, with minors in Biology and Theology, Teresa now lives with her husband and four children in Reading, Pennsylvania.