Fire Weather: A True Story from a Hotter World

Winner of the 2023 Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction
FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD IN NONFICTION
A stunning account of a colossal wildfire that collided with a city, & a panoramic exploration of the rapidly changing relationship between fire & humankind from the award-winning, best-selling author of The Tiger & The Golden Spruce“Grips like a philosophical thriller, warns like a beacon, & shocks to the core." —Robert Macfarlane, bestselling author of Underland
“Riveting, spellbinding, astounding on every page.” —David Wallace-Wells, #1 bestselling author of The Uninhabitable Earth
In May 2016, Fort McMurray, the hub of Canada’s oil industry & America’s biggest foreign supplier, was overrun by wildfire. The multi-billion-dollar disaster melted vehicles, turned entire neighborhoods into firebombs, & drove 88,000 people from their homes in a single afternoon. Through the lens of this apocalyptic conflagration—the wildfire equivalent of Hurricane Katrina—John Vaillant warns that this was not a unique event, but a shocking preview of what we must prepare for in a hotter, more flammable world.Fire has been a partner in our evolution for hundreds of millennia, shaping culture, civilization, and, very likely, our brains. Fire has enabled us to cook our food, defend & heat our homes, & power the machines that drive our titanic economy. Yet this volatile energy source has always threatened to elude our control, & in our new age of intensifying climate change, we are seeing its destructive power unleashed in previously unimaginable ways.
With masterly prose & a cinematic eye, Vaillant takes us on a riveting journey through the intertwined histories of North America’s oil industry & the birth of climate science, to the unprecedented devastation wrought by modern forest fires, & into lives forever changed by these disasters. John Vaillant’s urgent work is a book for—& from—our n