Winner of the 2023 Baillie Gifford Prize for Nonfiction

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.