1976. During the hottest summer in over three centuries, roads bubble, trains catch fire, and fields burn for days as the Robinson family’s emotions simmer toward an inevitable boil.

On the morning of the hottest day of the summer in the English countryside, the Robinson children set out cycling along the dry riverbed near their home. By lunchtime, the children and their mother, Gillian, are sitting at their usual table in the local Italian restaurant, where their father Tony’s empty seat is the first signal that something has gone horribly wrong. For Philip, the eldest son, that terrible day comes to represent the end of childhood and the beginning of a lifetime spent trying to understand his family's secrets.

Moving between Gillian and Tony’s tender courtship in the 1950s, the searing summer of 1976, and the aftershocks that follow, the novel reveals how violence, desire, and impulsive decisions echo across generations.

As Philip grows up, he struggles to make sense of a childhood shaped by tenderness and fear, while a secret first love offers the possibility of another life beyond the shadow of one fateful day. Sweeping in scope yet intimate in its portrayal of ordinary lives, When Everything Was Burning is an unforgettable novel of grief, desire, the fictions families construct and the truths that lie behind them.