Fire Weather

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

*Shortlisted for the Wainwright Conservation Prize 2024*

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

In May 2016, a Canadian oil town was overrun by wildfire, turning entire neighbourhoods into firebombs and driving 90,000 people from their homes.

Through the gripping story of this apocalyptic conflagration, John Vaillant explores our relationship with fire, an energy source that has been our partner in evolution for hundreds of millennia, shaping our culture and civilization. Now, in our age of intensifying climate change, its destructive power has been unleashed in ways previously unimaginable.

Fire Weather is an astounding account of this century's most intense urban fire, and an urgent examination of humanity's future in an ever-hotter, more flammable world.

'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