Katherine Rundell, author
I’ve been reading a superb and terrifying book: Fire Weather, by John Vaillant, which has recently won the Baillie Gifford prize for nonfiction. It’s the story of locals, lawmakers and firefighters, confronting a fire in Fort McMurray, Canada so intense it created its own weather systems: lightning, hurricanes, storms. It’s an account of what is to come: houses full of flammable plastic, soil dried out by climate change. The book is chilling, especially in the light of the UN’s recent announcement that that we are currently on track for 2.9 degrees of global warming – but it reads with pace and flair and a rich, furious clarity.
