"A painter drowns alone in her bath on Vancouver Island in her 81st year. In Burma a young British engineer kneels in the monsoon mud and weeps for his favorite elephant. The long swells of the North Pacific roll a great white Empress eastbound from China as a tiny orchestra plays and a golden lady dances. For two and a half centuries, life is measured by the iron pendulum of a family's enormous oak clock. Ashes, a luminous turquoise cloud, sail one last time for China and drift between the pink islets of Champlain's Sweet Sea. Dance cards, war diaries, menus, naval dispatches and Michael Mitchell's prose - The Molly Fire is both a moving memoir and a meditation on loss and identity."--Jacket.