The Last Fire Season: A Personal and Pyronatural History

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H Is for Hawk meets Joan Didion in the Pyrocene in this arresting combination of memoir, natural history, and literary inquiry that chronicles one woman's experience of life in Northern California during the worst fire season on record. H Is for Hawk meets Joan Didion in the Pyrocene in this arresting combination of memoir, natural history, and literary inquiry that chronicles one woman's experience of life in Northern California during the worst fire season on record. NATIONAL BESTSELLER. AN NPR BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR . A MOST-ANTICIPATED BOOK- The New York Times,The Los Angeles Times,The San Francisco Chronicle,The Saturday Evening Post,Poets & Writers, The Millions,Alta,Heat Map News Told in luminous, perceptive prose, The Last Fire Season is a deeply incisive inquiry into what it really means-now-to live in relationship to the elements of the natural world. When Manjula Martin moved from the city to the woods of Northern California, she wanted to be closer to the wilderness that she had loved as a child. She was also seeking refuge from a health crisis that left her with chronic pain, and found a sense of healing through tending her garden beneath the redwoods of Sonoma County. But the landscape that Martin treasured was an ecosystem already in crisis. Wildfires fueled by climate change were growing bigger and more frequent- each autumn, her garden filled with smoke and ash, and the local firehouse siren wailed deep into the night. In 2020, when a dry lightning storm ignited hundreds of simultaneous wildfires across the West and kicked off the worst fire season on record, Martin, along with thousands of other Californians, evacuated her home in the midst of a pandemic. Both a love letter to the forests of the West and an interrogation of the colonialist practices that led to their current dilemma, The Last Fire Season, follows her from the oaky hills of Sonoma County to the redwood forests of coastal Santa Cruz, to the pines and peaks of the Sierra Nevada, as she seeks shelter, bears witness to the devastation, and tries to better understand fire's role in the ecology of the West. As Martin seeks a way to navigate the daily experience of living in a damaged body on a damaged planet, she comes to question her own assumptions about nature and the complicated connections between people and the land on which we live.

Reviews

One of Esquires Best Memoirs of the Year
One of Mother Jones Best Books We Read This Year
One of The New York Times 18 New Books to Read in January
One of The San Francisco Chronicles 19 New Books to Cozy Up with This Winter
One of The Los Angeles Times 10 Books to Add to Your Reading List in January
One of The Saturday Evening Posts 10 Reads for the New Year
A Poets & Writers New and Noteworthy Book
One of The Millions Most Anticipated Books of Winter 2024
One of LitHubs Most Anticipated Books of 2024
One of Altas 12 New Books for January
One of Heat Map News 17 Climate Books to Read in 2024
One of the TODAY Shows Best Spring Reads

Martins clear prose stirs and sings, balancing justified rage and anxiety with a tenderness that never veers into sentimentality. A memoir threaded with natural history and a complicated love letter to the wild and imperiled California landscape Martin calls home, The Last Fire Season shows readers one way to both hold grief and look for new possibilities in the face of an uncertain future.
Esquire, The Best Memoirs of 2024 (So Far)

Powerful . . . This . . . isnt a hand-wringing chronicle of climate despair. Nor is it a can-do narrative buoyed by inspirational hash tags and techno-optimistic hopes. Martins 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

Beautifully written . . . Martins account of chronic pain and climate grief is informed by a historically astute social-justice mission, which delivers some hard truths . . . an unflinching memoir . . . at once mournful and hopeful.
The San Francisco Chronicle

Martin records what it was like to live through and alongside these conflagrations with a lyrical attention to detail and through a deeply personal lens. [She has a] nuanced way of seeing fire as both something to fear and as a necessary element in the evolution of the Earths ecosystems.
NPR

Unsettling, timely . . . Martins 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's at her most compelling, though, looking inward to examine lived experience and the often problematic or insufficient narrative frameworks in which those experiences are couched.
Los Angeles Review of Books

Martins escape from the conflagrations comprises only one thin layer of this intricate and uncategorizable narrative, which undulates between a zoomed-out study of the history and ecology of the area, a deeply personal exploration of living through both climate chaos and reproductive pain, a gardening memoir, and an inquiry into the psychology of coping with disaster. . . . It functions as both a balm and a wake-up call.Mother Jones, Curl Up with the Best Books We Read This Year

Amitav Ghosh has written that the absence of climate change as an informing theme for contemporary literature bespeaks a crisis of cultural imagination. The Last Fire Season offers a reply to his challenge. It shows how a confused, compounding barrage of phenomena and experiences can be transmuted into personal meaning.
Science

As I read Manjulas new book, The Last Fire Season, I admired all over again the qualities I observed in her in our first meeting. Her kindness and candor. Her curiosity and intellectual courage. Her willingness to explore and contemplate the layers of things rather than reaching for easy judgment . . . Its a book rich with insight.
Cheryl Strayed, Dear Sugar

Its the story of how California came to be, its the story of fire, and why its both essential to life and something we all fear, and its the story of how fire season is no longer one time of the year, or in one part of the world, but is something that impacts us all.
Jasmine Guillory, TODAYs Best Spring Reads

Offers a deep dive into how we reached this crisis point: the personal and pyronatural histories promised in the subtitle. The author demonstrates an impressive command of both the story and its stakesthe mix a good memoir offersas well as the engaging research of the best narrative nonfiction. As the fires rage, we follow her as if on a well-planned hike through an uncontrolled landscape.
Alta

Riveting . . . both a chronicle and a handbook of the struggle to fight the distortion of grief into despair.
The Los Angeles Times

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, 18 New Books to Read in January

Climate change, the biggest, most obvious thing ever to happen on this planet, should be the subject of more literature and art. So said Amitav Ghosh in his 2016 book, The Great Derangement. This could be Martins mission statement: to do as Ghosh said, to make culture about climate. And also staying within the trouble, as the feminist scholar and historian Donna Haraway, another inspiration to Martin, phrases itto fully feel the catastrophe we are living through. Martins memoir is the first one Ive read that centers this mission, these feelings and thoughts, this struggle with the great climate catastrophe of our time.
The Atlantic

Devastating and ambivalent, The Last Fire Season tries to sift through the ashes of climate change.
The Millions, Most Anticipated: The Great Winter 2024 Preview

A personal history turned examination of fire and ecology, The Last Fire Season is strangely timely amid a balmy winter some have never experienced before.
LitHub, Most Anticipated Books of 2024

Martin argues that a fundamental shift in the dominant cultures 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

Learning to simultaneously love and grieve will inescapably be one of the great challenges of the climate crisis, faced by people around the world, living in suddenly unpredictable environments. Grounded in her lyrical prose and her contagious, deep-rooted love for her natural surroundings, Martin shares her journey in learning to do precisely that.
Sierra Club

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 a year in the smoldering, angry, inflamed Northern California woods will thrill, haunt, and ultimately charm you.
Susan Orlean, author of On Animals

[A] mesmerizing, 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, Martins 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, starred review

The prose of this Sonoma County-based author crackles from the first electrifying pages. Combining memoir and natural history to masterful effect, Manjula Martin tells the story of the 2020 California wildfire season that stained skies a haunting shade of orange up and down the West Coast.
The San Francisco Chronicle, 19 New Books to Cozy Up with This Winter

The Last Fire Season is 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, Martins 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

Martins search for answers takes her far from the events of the specific fire that precipitated them and demands a degree of patience from readers, but her emotional response is palpable and will resonate with many.
Booklist

Compelling . . . gripping . . . Its a book about Californias natural history and fire-management practices. But its also a book about post-traumatic stress disorder and grief . . . What might be most affecting in Martins memoir is her characterization of the emotional state that many Californians and many Americans feel in a rapidly destabilizing world.
Lookout Santa Cruz

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 g

Author Bio

MANJULA MARTIN is coauthor, with her father, Orin Martin, of Fruit Trees for Every Garden, which won the 2020 American Horticultural Society Book Award. Her nonfiction has appeared in The New Yorker, Virginia Quarterly Review, The Cut, Pacific Standard, Modern Farmer, and Hazlitt. She edited the anthology Scratch- Writers, Money, and the Art of Making a Living; was managing editor of Francis Ford Coppola's literary magazine, Zoetrope- All-Story; and has worked in varied editorial capacities in the nonprofit and publishing sectors. She lives in West Sonoma County, California.