NATIONAL BESTSELLER
AN NPR BEST BOOK OF 2024

“Powerful” —New York Times
“Riveting” —Los Angeles Times
“Electrifying” —San Francisco Chronicle

“A beautifully written account of living through and trying to come to terms with the harrowing impacts of the climate crisis. . . . In the spirit of Rebecca Solnit and Terry Tempest Williams, Martin’s knowledge of nature and the land illuminate every page. With [this book] she joins the ranks of esteemed, provocative nature writers who use their own experiences to examine our past and our future.”
—BookPage, starred review

Praise for The Last Fire Season:

  • “I loved this book. Through her soulful and poignant prose, Manjula Martin finds meaning in a time of unravelling, and agency at a moment of helplessness. She shows us how to exist through our existential crises, and lights our path through the fire.”

    —Ed Yong, author of An Immense World

  • “Martin comes in with a one-two punch: Her book is as lyrical as a prose poem but as smartly reported as the best journalism. Her account of living in the smoldering, angry, inflamed Northern California woods will thrill, haunt, and ultimately charm you.”

    —Susan Orlean, author of On Animals

  • "Exquisitely attuned to her Northern California landscape, Martin trains her gaze on wilderness ravaged by wildfire, and on her own body, hobbled by a chronic pain condition, teasing out the intricate connections between human beings and the natural world on which they depend.”

    —The New York Times

  • “This is a book that will haunt you. A beautifully composed, exhaustively researched guide through the changes and cataclysms of body, home, and landscape, written with the lyricism of a fable and an urgency befitting our all too real climate crisis.”

    —Nicole Chung, author of A Living Remedy

  • "An impressive interweaving of various narrative modes.... Martin levels colonial and capitalist Californian mythologies with the efficiency and precision of a controlled burn.”

    —Los Angeles Review of Books

  • “This is the kind of natural history writing we need at this most crucial moment. It’s precise, granular, and lovely, but it’s also engaged, and entirely honest in grappling with change. The shifting baseline of the world around us is the story of our moment, and it’s rarely been better told.”

    —Bill McKibben, author of The End of Nature and founder of 350.org

  • “The Last Fire Season is a poetic, instructive document for our times. In sharing her experience of new disasters, Martin reveals that our collective challenge in facing climate change is no less than the ancient human condition: to find and create beauty amid pain, to hold at once love and grief.”

    —Sarah Smarsh, author of Heartland

  • “An act of gorgeous excavation. Peeling back the American myth of wilderness, Martin interrogates the complicity of inhabiting a human body within a world grievously damaged by human hands. Clear eyed and stunning, Martin’s words are both a love letter and eulogy to the land, bearing witness to the complex human truth that we can deeply care for something even as we violate it.”

    —Tessa Hulls, author of Feeding Ghosts

  • “This is a profoundly moving work about humanity and home—both the individual places that we try to claim, and our singular, beautiful, complex Earth in a moment of epochal change."

    — Lydia Kiesling, author of Mobility

  • "Martin argues that a fundamental shift in the dominant culture’s attitude toward fire and nature is necessary. We can no longer think in terms of a ‘fire season.’ We must now learn to adapt to living with fire throughout the year. Insightful and alarming, hopeful and consistently engaging.”

    —Kirkus, starred review

  • "In the spirit of Rebecca Solnit and Terry Tempest Williams, Martin's knowledge of nature and the land illuminate every page. With The Last Fire Season, she joins the ranks of esteemed, provocative nature writers who use their own experiences to examine our past and our future."

    —Bookpage

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