Fire Weather

Critics Review

• No book feels timelier than John Vaillant’s Fire Weather, a deeply reported narrative of one of Canada’s most destructive recent wildfires . . . an adrenaline-soaked nightmare that is impossible to put down . . . The drama of the unfolding action and the righteous anger of the polemic concealed within are engrossing

  The Times

• ‘All-consuming . . . Vaillant’s urgent disaster story [is] meticulous in its detail, both human and geological in its scale, and often shocking in its conclusions

  Observer

• Page-turning and pacy

  Daily Telegraph

• Riveting, spellbinding, astounding on every page. John Vaillant is one of the great poetic chroniclers of the natural world, and here he captures the majesty and horror of one of its great disasters – and what made it tragically possible

  David Wallace-Wells

• Could not be a more timely work . . . Eloquent . . . his powerful book is a must read for anyone interested in our collective future

  Daily Mail

• What makes Fire Weather so good is its in-depth analysis of the moral, political, environmental and even anthropological background to both the climate crisis and our relationship with fire in all its forms . . . We all need to heed this powerful book

  Spectator

• Mesmerizing . . . meticulous and meditative

  New York Times

• Provides a refreshingly clear explanation of this hazy, uncanny moment in the earth’s history . . . Vaillant is the type of journalist who picks a single narrative and monomaniacally researches it, plunging himself deeper and deeper into the murky details, and then emerges, many years later, with a small universe cupped in his hands . . . by turns heart-racing and horrifying

  New York Magazine

• Riveting . . . Fire Weather is notable for its vivid descriptions of the destructive power of a wildfire so big it creates its own weather . . . Using the drama of the wildfire as a way in, Vaillant gives a damning history of the Canadian oil sands industry and the environmental damage it has wrought on Alberta’s forests and waters . . . The book’s descriptions of the scale of the industry required to distil something usable from such a material are nearly as astonishing as its renderings of the fire

  New Scientist

• In John Vaillant’s vivid anatomy of the apocalyptic Fort McMurray inferno, the histories of humankind’s ever-accelerating consumption of fossil fuel, and of our ever-increasing vulnerability to extreme wildfire, converge with the relentlessness of fate – and the urgency of prophecy

  Philip Gourevitch

• A forensic account of the contradictions and costs of Canada’s ill-fated tar sands adventure. Explosive reportage at its best

  Ben Rawlence, author of The Treeline

• This book is fuelled by Vaillant’s genius for storytelling, ignited by intelligence both virtuosic and profound, and burns with the hell of a world on fire

  Jay Griffiths, author of Wild: An Elemental Journey

• Fire Weather is a compulsively readable journey into our fiery times – by turns a propulsive account of the Fort McMurray Fire burning an oil town to ash; an investigation into the gas-guzzling economic systems that make wildfires so hot they melt steel (and so large they form their own weather); and a meditation on the human relationship with combustion. At the centre, Vaillant gives us fire itself as a character – fast, hungry, and evolving to shape the warming decades to come

  Bathsheba Demuth, author of Floating Coast

• The Fort McMurray fire was a vortex of people, ideas, institutions, forest, oil, city, and wind, the quirky and the existential, all mutating under the wanton impress of the Anthropocene Age. Fire Weather offers a compelling account of that tragedy, and a reimagining of a pyric infection that threatens to remake the planet

  Stephen Pyne, author of The Pyrocene

• A riveting exploration of fire and humankind. While for millennia, fire has been a partner in our evolution, Vaillant shows to devastating effect that in our age of climate change, we are seeing its destructive power unleashed in ways never before witnessed

  The Bookseller

• Stunning and powerful … Scrupulously and thoroughly researched … one of the finest books of the year. Despite its density and the disturbing nature of many of its scenes, Fire Weather is an absolutely compelling read

  Toronto Star

• Searing . . . Vaillant’s exploration of fire draws on physics and chemistry, philosophy and symbolism . . . His robust and vivid writing, detailed reporting, and urgent concern for the environment make for sizzling reading

  Booklist

• Gripping . . . Vaillant’s exploration of this material is rich and illuminating, and his prose punchy and cinematic . . . The result is an engrossing disaster tale with a potent message

  Publishers Weekly

• There’s a lot of good Elizabeth Kolbert-level popular science writing here along with grittier portraits of the lives of the people who make their living among the tar sands and scrub . . . A timely, well-written work of climate change reportage

  Kirkus

• Dramatic . . . Captivating . . . a fascinating history of regional exploitation and illustrative absurdities

  Scientific American

• A tale of terror from a climate change frontline . . . Fire Weather includes a lot about the science of fire and weather. But it is also a book about the cognitive dissonance in climate change discourse . . . Epic

  Financial Times

• Impressive . . . a great piece of storytelling, well paced and relentlessly gripping . . . a remarkable, often thrilling book

  Literary Review

• A towering achievement; an immense work of research, reflection and imagination . . . Fire Weather is extraordinary in terms of its scope and range; it also sings and surprises at the level of the sentence. It grips like a philosophical thriller, warns like a beacon, and shocks to the core

  Robert Macfarlane