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The Incendiaries is a slim, coiled thing - barely two hundred pages - that attempts to pack the weight of first love, religious extremism, grief, class resentment and domestic terrorism into its compact frame. Whether it succeeds depends almost entirely on what you want a novel to do.

Set at the fictional Edwards University in upstate New York, the book triangulates three damaged young people. Will Kendall is a transfer student from a California evangelical college, a former missionary-in-training whose faith has collapsed and who works restaurant shifts to hide his poverty from his wealthier peers. Phoebe Lin is a former piano prodigy carrying unbearable guilt over her mother's death. And John Leal is the half-Korean cult leader who claims to have survived a North Korean gulag, drawing Phoebe and other vulnerable students into his extremist group, Jejah. The novel opens with a bombing at an abortion clinic and spends its remaining pages asking how, and whether, Phoebe became complicit.

Kwon's prose is the book's most frequently praised attribute, and deservedly so. She writes in short, crackling sentences that often glitter - there are passages of genuine luminosity, particularly in the early stretches of Will and Phoebe's romance, where Cape Cod mornings and Beijing streets take on a dreamlike quality. The novel's structure, too, is quietly audacious. Though chapters are attributed to all three characters, everything is filtered through Will's unreliable memory, including the sections supposedly giving voice to Phoebe and John Leal. This slow reveal - that Will has been constructing the story to serve his own grief and guilt - is the book's sharpest trick, and its finest moments hinge on the growing discomfort of realising how little we actually know.

That same device, however, is the source of the book's most serious problems. Because everything passes through Will's consciousness, Phoebe remains frustratingly spectral - a woman conjured rather than known, described in language that can veer into the leering when her body enters the frame. Readers hoping for a genuine investigation of cult psychology will find themselves repeatedly pulled back into Will's jealousy, his class anxieties, and his self-pity. John Leal, for all his dark backstory, rarely coheres into a plausibly charismatic leader; it is hard to believe this man could persuade anyone of anything. The pacing in the final act feels hurried, and a crucial violent act by Will arrives so abruptly that it reads as a narrative convenience rather than a character revelation.

Comparisons to Donna Tartt's The Secret History are inevitable and mostly unflattering - the ingredients are similar but the alchemy thinner. The Incendiaries is a book of atmosphere and sentence-level precision rather than plot or depth. For those who prize lyrical interiority over narrative engine, it offers genuine rewards. For those who came for a propulsive story about fanaticism, it will feel like a beautifully wrapped box containing less than promised. Either way, it announces a writer worth watching.