Charlie Johnson is an American journalist working for a British news agency somewhere in the Balkans. He believes that over the course of a long career he has seen everything, but suddenly he finds himself more than simply a witness. A woman who has been sheltering Charlie and his crew is doused in gasoline and set on fire. As she stumbles, burning, down the road, Charlie dashes from hiding and throws her down, rolling her over and over to extinguish the flames, and burning his hands in the process. Believing the woman's life to have been saved, Charlie is traumatized by her subsequent death. Something in him snaps. He now realizes he has just one ambition left in life: to find the colonel responsible for her death and confront him. Charlie Johnson in the Flames is a major novel by award-winning author Michael Ignatieff, one of the leading political thinkers of our age. A profound meditation on war and guilt, it moves with the pace of a thriller. Indeed, the image of Charlie wrestling with the burning woman might stand as a metaphor for the entire relationship between the West and the rest of the world.