Fire Weather, by John Vaillant has been announced as the winner of this year's Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction.
A stunning account of this century's most intense urban fire, and a panoramic exploration of the rapidly changing relationship between fire and humankind.
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 an urgent book for our new century of fire.
'John Vaillant is one of the great poetic chroniclers of the natural world' David Wallace-Wells
'A towering achievement; an immense work of research, reflection and imagination' Robert Macfarlane
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