The Last Fire Season

A Personal and Pyronatural History

By: Manjula Martin

Narrated by: Manjula Martin

Length: 13 hrs and 9 mins

Publisher's summary

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.

©2024 Manjula Martin (P)2024 Random House Audio

Critic reviews

“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

“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

Hard to get through

Interesting if you want to learn about California history and vegetation. I was moved by her personal story

That I know the areas somewhat my kids live near Santa Cruz

I initially thought this was going to be fabulous… but like I tend to do she went into way toooo much detail!!!
Actually I skipped thru several chapters toward the end! Sorry, just wanted to be finished!

Some odd analogies but incredible incite to living in a forest that could catch on fire at any time!

Some of the story seemed to stretch the analogies too far — too big of a leap in relating one item of the story to the feelings of the author. Also identifying internal extensive pain, but also almost NOT giving enough detailing of that pain if the story was also supposed to be about that. The title of the book should be the flowers that only bloom after the fire — instead of related to a fire season.

Utterly riveting. A must read.

Her use of words, the juxtaposition of nature and history and her relationships make it utterly riveting. The botanical expertise with her father added a level of insight that is unexpected and remarkable. I highly recommend this book. A must read.