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OverviewTold 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. 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. 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. Full Product DetailsAuthor: Manjula MartinPublisher: Random House USA Inc Imprint: Random House Inc Dimensions: Width: 15.60cm , Height: 3.10cm , Length: 23.50cm Weight: 0.612kg ISBN: 9780593317150ISBN 10: 0593317157 Pages: 352 Publication Date: 16 January 2024 Audience: General/trade , General Format: Hardback Publisher's Status: Active Availability: To order  Stock availability from the supplier is unknown. We will order it for you and ship this item to you once it is received by us. Table of ContentsAugust 1. Storm 3 Go bag—Bay leaves—A brief pyronatural history of California—Turtle Island—On pruning 2. Sea 38 Over the hill—The land—Aftershocks—The sea—Dawn patrol 3. Glacier 67 Love letters—A garden—What the tule knows—Pit stop—Where water comes from 4. Steam 97 The recreators—Hangtown—Fuel September 5. Hawk 115 A season—Beauty and sweetness—The river 6. Sky 135 What smoke is—The day without a sky—Visions 7. Smoke 154 Outside things—Inside things—Bread—Days of Awe October 8. Devils 181 Wine Country—The people who stay—Devils—Flare-ups—Fire flowers 9. Gods 226 Foxes—Red flag—Surf lessons—What the forest knows 10. Veils 249 After wind—Veils—Helicopter—Portal— The recumbent November 11. Owl 275 Watchers—Hashtag strong—Dozer lines 12. Oak 290 Good fire—A brief pyronatural history of women—Rain 13. Dirt 306 Stewardship—Black gold Acknowledgments 323 Source Notes 325Reviews"""The Last Fire Season is a gorgeous, soulfully written, intricately layered meditation on a region, a state, a body and a planet. Manjula Martin brings deep research, love, and attention to her exploration of northern California in polycrisis and weaves her findings with profound personal reflections on chronic pain and bodily harm. This is a work of memoir, ecology, physiology, political economy, horticulture, and history, and a profoundly moving work about humanity and home, both the individual places that we try to claim, and our singular, beautiful, complex planet in a moment of epochal change."" — Lydia Kiesling, author of Mobility and The Golden State" "“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 “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, not the timeless beauty of the world, is the story of our moment, and it's rarely been better told.” —Bill McKibben, author of The End of Nature ""The Last Fire Season is a gorgeous, soulfully written, intricately layered meditation on a region, a state, a body and a planet. Manjula Martin brings deep research, love, and attention to her exploration of northern California in polycrisis and weaves her findings with profound personal reflections on chronic pain and bodily harm. This is a work of memoir, ecology, physiology, political economy, horticulture, and history, and a profoundly moving work about humanity and home, both the individual places that we try to claim, and our singular, beautiful, complex planet in a moment of epochal change."" — Lydia Kiesling, author of Mobility and The Golden State" Author InformationMANJULA 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. Tab Content 6Author Website:Countries AvailableAll regions |
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