Fire Weather: A True Story from a Hotter World - Winner of the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction (Paperback) - John Vaillant

A page-turning account of a brutal urban wildfire, and a sweeping exploration of our rapidly changing relationship with fire

THE INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER, WINNER OF THE BAILLIE GIFFORD PRIZE

A Pulitzer Prize Finalist
A National Book Award Finalist
A Writers' Trust Award Finalist
Longlisted for the Wainwright Conservation Prize

A Guardian Book of the Year
A New York Times Book of the Year


'No book feels timelier . . . an adrenaline-soaked nightmare that is impossible to put down'
Cal Flyn, The Times

'Superb and terrifying'
Katherine Rundell, Guardian

'It reads like a thriller . . . utterly compelling'
Andrea Wulf, author of The Invention of Nature

'Astounding on every page'
David Wallace-Wells, author of The Uninhabitable Earth

'A towering achievement . . . extraordinary'
Robert Macfarlane, author of Underland

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.

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.