They called themselves saviours of burning houses, though none of the six women, their ages ranging from mid-fifties to early seventies, had had much experience outside the worlds of their employment before they retired: small cubicles behind barred windows for the two bank tellers; large offices shared by too many people for the three secretaries; and a front room in a six-storey university building, where for many years Mrs Lu had guarded the door to a girls' dorm.

The six women, friends and comrades for about two years now, had first met at a local park, where mothers, keen for their children's marriages to happen met other equally anxious mothers. Between them the six women had four sons and four daughters, all of them unhurried by the ticking of the clock that kept their mothers sleepless at night. Hitting it off from the beginning, the women made ingenious plans in the hope that some of them would become connected by marriages and then by shared grandchildren. Meetings of their children were arranged, coerced in some cases. In the end, none of the matches produced any fruitful results. Still, the six women remained close, and when Mrs Fan, the youngest among them, realized that her husband was having an affair with a woman whose identity he refused to reveal, the other five women, enraged by the audacity of the husband who was approaching sixty yet behaving like a foolish boy without a heart or brain, appointed themselves detectives to find out the truth.

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'House Fire' will be printed in full in Granta 97: Best of Young American Novelists 2. To subscribe to Granta and receive the entire issue free, or to buy a copy of Granta 97, click here.