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The true story of the most devastating wildfire in Australian history and the search for the man who started it.
What kind of person would deliberately start a firestorm? What kind of mind?
On the scorching February day in 2009 that became known as Black Saturday, a man lit two fires in Victoria's Latrobe Valley, then sat on the roof of his house to watch the inferno. In the Valley, where the rates of crime were the highest in the state, more than thirty people were known to the police as firebugs. But the detectives soon found themselves on the trail of a man they didn't know.
The Arsonist takes readers on the hunt for this man, and inside the strange puzzle of his mind. This book is also the story of fire in Australia, and of a community that owed its existence to that very element. The command of fire has defined and sustained us as a species--understanding its abuse will shape our future.
A powerful true-crime thriller written with Hooper's trademark lyric detail and nuance, The Arsonist is a reminder that in an age of fire, all of us are gatekeepers.
"Consistently riveting and never fuzzy on the details, Hooper's book encompasses the specifics of the fire, its collateral damages, and the troubled mind behind the mayhem. A gripping true-crime chronicle in which the justice is both righteous and agonizing." - Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"The book tells the story of the 2009 Black Saturday blazes in Victoria, which rank among Australia's most deadly bushfires...But it is also the story of post-industrial, semi-rural communities and lack of government regulation in the Anthropocene. The Arsonist's environmental setting may help readers understand the context for Australia's current bushfire emergency." - Chicago Review of Books
"Hooper gives a cool appraisal of a hot issue...even-handed and nuanced." - The Guardian (UK)
"The Arsonist [is] by turns a fascinating real-life thriller, police procedural, intense sociological study and the long-overdue story of fire in Australia...Powerful and nuanced...In Hooper's sure hands the grimmest details become exquisite imagery. " - The Sydney Morning Herald (Australia)
"Hooper drops the reader inside the Black Saturday brushfires to terrifying effect, then masterfully shifts from the physical realm to the existential–namely, how and why a particular evil manifests. Visceral and terrifying." – Maureen Callahan, New York Times bestselling author of American Predator: The Hunt for the Most Meticulous Serial Killer of the 21st Century
This information about The Arsonist was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Chloe Hooper's The Tall Man: Death and Life on Palm Island (2008) won the Victorian, New South Wales, West Australian and Queensland Premier's Literary Awards, as well as the John Button Prize for Political Writing, and a Ned Kelly Award for crime writing. She is also the author of two novels, A Child's Book of True Crime and The Engagement.
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