THE LAST FIRE SEASON

H Is for Hawk meets Joan Didion in the Pyrocene . . .

The Last Fire Season is an arresting combination of memoir, natural history, and literary inquiry that chronicles one woman’s experience of life in Northern California during the expanding wildfire crisis. Told in luminous, perceptive prose, The Last Fire Season is for anyone seeking to understand what it really means to live in relationship with nature—right now, as the climate crisis unfolds.

“Powerful . . . This isn’t a hand-wringing chronicle of climate despair. Nor is it a can-do narrative buoyed by inspirational hash tags and techno-optimistic hopes. Martin’s book is at once more grounded and more surprising . . . the range of this book coaxes us to confront our own failures of imagination.”
—The New York Times

“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

Get your copy today. 

“Martin’s subtitle, A Personal and Pyronatural History, alludes to her impressive interweaving of various narrative modes. The result is a deft tessellation of medical memoir, local reportage, and ecocritical and literary meditation. … [She] levels colonial and capitalist Californian mythologies with the efficiency and precision of a controlled burn.” —Los Angeles Review of Books

When Manjula Martin moved from the city to the woods, she wanted to be closer to the landscapes she had loved as a child. She was also seeking refuge from a bodily crisis—a series of botched reproductive health procedures had left her with chronic pain. Martin found a sense of healing in tending a garden amid the magnificent redwoods of Sonoma County, but the ecosystems that she treasured were, like her body, in crisis. Fueled by climate change, wildfires were growing exponentially more destructive. In 2020, when a dry lightning storm ignited hundreds of simultaneous fires across the Western US and kicked off an unprecedented fire season, Martin, along with thousands of others, evacuated her home in the midst of a pandemic.

Both a love letter to the landscapes of the American West and an interrogation of the colonialist practices that shaped them, The Last Fire Season follows Martin from the oak woodlands of Sonoma County to the redwood groves of coastal Santa Cruz to the pines and peaks of the Sierra Nevada as she seeks shelter and tries to better understand fire’s elemental roles in ecology and culture.

As she explores the majestic landscapes of the North American West, she also seeks understanding of the landscapes and narratives of her own body. In order to navigate the daily experience of living in a damaged body on a damaged planet, Martin must confront and reframe her own presumptions about the relationships among people, the systems we create, land, and home—ultimately unearthing new possibilities for inhabiting beauty, pain, grief, joy, and care in the natural world.

  • MORE 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, The Library Book, and The Orchid Thief

  • “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

  • “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 book that will haunt you. A beautifully composed, exhaustively researched guide through the changes and cataclysms of body, home, and wild California 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

  • “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

  • "A gorgeous, soulfully written, intricately layered meditation on a region, a state, a body and a planet. 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 and The Golden State