Julie Maioriello Horner asked Francesca Haig:

LOVED, LOVED The Fire Sermon! Question, how did come up with the title?

Francesca Haig Thanks so much, Julie - delighted that you enjoyed The Fire Sermon! As for the title: I first came across the phrase in T.S. Eliot's immortal poem 'The Waste Land.' From the minute I ecountered the phrase, it really stuck in my mind. It turned out that Eliot had taken the phrase from an important Buddhist teaching about about detachment from earthly things and emotions. This seemed to fit with some of the ideas of my novel - but if I'm honest, I was hooked on the phrase before I'd even googled it to learn more about it. I found those three words alone so powerfully evocative. There's a couple of lines in the first page or so where I try to give some context for the title, within the world of the novel ('Before the blast, they say there’d been sermons about fire, about the end of the world. The fire itself gave the last sermon; after that there were no more.').

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