Fire Weather: A True Story from a Hotter World - Winner of the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction - Softcover

Vaillant, John

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1399720201 ISBN 13: 9781399720205

Publisher: Sceptre, 2023

Synopsis

*WINNER of the BAILLIE GIFFORD PRIZE FOR NON-FICTION*

***AN INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER***

* A Pulitzer Prize Finalist * A National Book Award Finalist * A Writers' Trust Award Finalist *

'No book feels timelier than John Vaillant's Fire Weather . . . an adrenaline-soaked nightmare that is impossible to put down' Cal Flyn, The Times

'Superb and terrifying . . . it reads with pace and flair and a rich, furious clarity' Katherine Rundell, author of Super-Infinite

A gripping account of this century's most intense urban fire, and a panoramic exploration of the rapidly changing relationship between humanity and fire's fierce energy.

In May 2016, Fort McMurray, Alberta, the hub of Canada's oil industry, was overrun by wildfire. The multi-billion-dollar disaster turned entire neighbourhoods into firebombs and drove 90,000 people from their homes in a single afternoon. Through the story of this apocalyptic conflagration, John Vaillant explores the past and the future of our ever-hotter, more flammable world.

For hundreds of millennia, fire has been a partner in our evolution, shaping culture and civilization. Yet in our age of intensifying climate change, we are seeing its destructive power unleashed in ways never before witnessed by human beings. With masterly prose and cinematic style, Vaillant delves into the intertwined histories of the oil industry and climate science, the unprecedented devastation wrought by modern wildfires, and the lives forever changed by these disasters. Fire Weather is urgent reading for our new century of fire.

'A towering achievement; an immense work of research, reflection and imagination' Robert Macfarlane

'Astounding on every page. John Vaillant is one of the great poetic chroniclers of the natural world' David Wallace-Wells, author of The Uninhabitable Earth

'It reads like a thriller . . . I could not put it down' Andrea Wulf, author of The Invention of Nature

About this title

About the Author

John Vaillant is a bestselling author and freelance writer whose work has appeared in the New Yorker, the Atlantic, National Geographic, and the Guardian, among others. His first book, The Golden Spruce, won the Canadian Governor General's Award for non-fiction. His second, The Tiger, was an international bestseller and was translated into sixteen languages, and The Jaguar's Children, his first work of fiction, was a finalist for the Canadian Writers' Trust Fiction Prize. His most recent book, Fire Weather, won the Baillie Gifford Prize and Canada's Shaughnessy Cohen Prize, and was a finalist the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award.

Edition details

• Publisher: Sceptre
• Publication date: 2023
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1399720201
• ISBN 13: 9781399720205
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 432