The Last Fire Season : A Personal and Pyronatural History

The Last Fire Season: A Personal and Pyronatural History is Manjula Martin's memoir, blending natural history and personal narrative around Northern California's devastating 2020 wildfire season.

Martin had moved to the woods of Sonoma County seeking a closer connection to nature and relief from chronic pain through gardening, but found herself living with an escalating wildfire crisis each autumn.

When a dry lightning storm ignited hundreds of fires across the West in 2020, she evacuated her home in the middle of the pandemic, prompting a deeper reckoning with fire's role in Western landscapes.

Moving through Sonoma's oak hills, coastal redwood forests, and the Sierra Nevada, Martin examines the colonialist practices behind today's fire crisis and asks readers to reconsider fire not simply as disaster but as an ecological necessity, while grappling with what it means to live with, and love, both a damaged body and a damaged planet.