Ischia is Burning

A Novel

by David Boles · Fiction · 2026 · 33 chapters · 576 pages · Includes 1990 screenplay addendum

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A novel of withheld knowledge and closed communities. Now available as a Kindle ebook and paperback, plus a complete 543-page free reading PDF for desktop and tablet readers.

About This Novel

Most books are written. A few are excavated.

Ischia is Burning is a novel I excavated from a steel filing cabinet in a Manhattan apartment, where it had been sitting for more than three decades inside a folder marked Ischia, in the form of a screenplay I wrote at twenty-five years old in the second year of an MFA program at Columbia. The novel that has just been published is what happened when I sat down with that folder in May, found the staples rusted and half the dialogue wincing, and wrote what the twenty-five-year-old version could not yet write.

Set in the autumn of 1986 on the western flank of the Italian island of Ischia, in a place called Mezzavia, the novel concerns four scientists who have spent eighteen years raising sixteen children inside a constructed Iron Age village, withholding twenty-four years of European history from them on the principle that the children will benefit from being raised inside a controlled epistemology. In September 1986, a cesium-137 contamination event begins to appear in the basin's groundwater, and the four adults face the question they have spent eighteen years not asking.

The novel runs thirty-three chapters and a closing addendum that reproduces the original 1990 screenplay unaltered, preserving the small infelicities of a twenty-five-year-old beside the moral attention of a sixty-one-year-old working on identical material thirty-six years apart.

Ischia is burning.

Cockpit transmission · Zero four sixteen · September 1986

A Thirty-Six-Year Novel

I wrote the first version of Ischia is Burning as a thesis screenplay in 1990, in a class at Columbia University's School of the Arts taught by Grafton Nunes. Grafton, then associate dean of the School of the Arts, had produced Kathryn Bigelow's first feature, The Loveless, with Willem Dafoe in his first leading role. He told me the screenplay was the best student work he had ever read. With a teacher's specificity, he named the adjustments he wanted me to make. Blockbuster was the word he reached for, as if he were predicting a weather event.

I did not make the adjustments.

The screenplay went into a steel filing cabinet on East 13th Street. It stayed there for thirty-six years. The notebook in which I had written down Grafton's adjustments was lost in a move sometime in the late 1990s, and after that I told myself for a long time that I could not begin the novel because I could not remember what he had said. I see now that the unremembered adjustments were the alibi. At twenty-five I was not old enough to write what finding out costs a child. Nor was I old enough to write what finding out costs the adults who have spent eighteen years not telling.

The novel is the answer the four adults arrive at, written by the writer who has spent thirty-six years carrying the question.

The Basin on Pithekoussai

Inside the basin live four adults and sixteen children. The children range in age from six to seventeen. By training, the adults are an anthropologist, a physician, a pilot, and a linguist. They have spent eighteen years building a closed Iron Age village around the children, complete with hand-woven clothing, a small iron mill the children themselves operate, a constructed Germanic dialect rooted in Old Norse and Old High German, an invented cosmology with four gods and eight constellations, and a sky with no airplanes in it.

The children believe they are living in the Iron Age. They believe this because the four adults have withheld twenty-four years of European history from them. No radios enter the basin. No printed page betrays the year. The antibiotic that would tell a child the world contains chemistry beyond the herbal poultice does not exist there.

The title is also a transmitted phrase. A pilot speaks it into a dispatch microphone at zero four sixteen on a Thursday in September 1986, from the cockpit of a plane climbing out of the American air base at Aviano in northeastern Italy. The book takes its thirty-three chapters to answer three questions about that phrase: what is burning, who is speaking it, and where the radio signal is going.

What the Reading Edition Contains

The published reading edition runs 576 pages in paperback dimensions, with the prose body of the novel followed by full back matter and the original 1990 screenplay reproduced unaltered. Components are arranged so that a reader who finishes Chapter Thirty-Three can decide whether to continue into the documentary apparatus, the screenplay version, or both.

Novel · Thirty-three chapters of prose across approximately 130,000 words, opening in September 1986 and closing with the events of the same week observed from four different vantage points.

Foreword · A five-thousand-word account titled Thirty-Six Years explaining the screenplay's 1990 origins at Columbia, Grafton Nunes's assessment, the steel filing cabinet, and the May 2026 decision to sit down with the pages again.

Glossary of the Constructed Dialect · Definitions of the eleven words of the children's Germanic-rooted dialect, including the four-god names Skyfar, Vannrot, Fyrlas, and Hochlinde, and the daily ritual terms firstgrey, ganzdunk, bittermilk, halsmer, streknot, ungwit, and grünwit.

Translations · Dutch, German, Italian, and Latin phrases used in the novel, translated for readers who want to verify their inferences from context.

Notes on Sources · Documentary anchors for the moral architecture, including the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, the Willowbrook hepatitis study, Decree 770 of the Socialist Republic of Romania, the Stanford prison experiment of 1971, and the Sigonella crisis of October 1985.

Reading Group Discussion Guide · Twelve questions designed to push a reading group toward the harder ones about consent, the testimony of children, and the architecture of withheld knowledge.

Addendum I: The 1990 Screenplay · The original Columbia thesis screenplay, reproduced unaltered, with its small infelicities of a twenty-five-year-old preserved as they were committed.

A typical novel ends at chapter thirty-three and lets the reader close the book. Ischia is Burning keeps going, with the apparatus that lets the reader test the novel's claims against the documented historical record and against the writer's own earlier attempt at the same story.

From the Text

They took the children's centuries from them.

It is the smaller breakage.

Kira-mine, this is the blood the iron leaves in the rock. Vannrot weeps it for the smith who is to come.

For Reading Groups

If you are running a reading group, this novel was built for you. The Reading Group Discussion Guide in the back of the book is designed to keep the conversation honest, with twelve questions that move from the basin's mechanics outward to the harder questions about consent, the testimony of children, and the line between protection and concealment in everyone's own family, profession, and country.

What the novel withholds from the reader is the easy answers. The questions are asked in a form that will not let the reader close the book and walk away from them.

I would be delighted to talk with your book club, classroom, or seminar about the novel. The questions raised in Ischia is Burning run from the bioethical to the literary to the political, and a reading group is the use I would most like the book to be put to.

Reach Out to David

Author Interview

About the Author

David Boles is a writer, dramatist, editor, and publisher. A member of the Dramatists Guild since 1984 and a graduate of the Oscar Hammerstein II Center for Theatre Studies at Columbia University, he has published novels, nonfiction, and dramatic works through David Boles Books Writing and Publishing since 1975. His titles include the Institutional Autopsy trilogy (Carceral Nation, The Claimed Body, Underwritten), The Broadway Machine, Miscast, The Apothecary of Mantua, Beautiful Numbness, Selling Saturday Morning, the Fractional Fiction series, the EleMenTs trilogy, The Borrowed Saint, and many other works. He hosts the Human Meme podcast, publishes literary journalism at Prairie Voice, and maintains a web constellation that has been active since 1995.

Boles is a member of the Dramatists Guild, Authors Guild, and PEN America. He lives in New York City with the Deaf ASL educator Janna Sweenie and two British Shorthair cats.

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