When a wildfire bears down on a mountain community, residents are forced to gather—resulting in a sudden tangle of love and lust, friendships that form across political divides, and a new hope for rethinking the ways we inhabit the burning planet. Throughout these linked stories, we encounter a world as jarring and mesmerizing as fire itself—a literary landscape of experimental forms: An astrology report. A grant application-turned-love-story. A phone call from Mother Earth. An obituary for a wildfire. A burned mountain’s conversation with a lone woman and injured bear. Like one domino falling into another, each story reveals another piece of an intricate puzzle.

Playing with technique and disrupting expectation, this powerful collection captures how fire affects psyches and lives. And it shows how, sometimes, demolition can lead to renovation.

About the author

Laura Pritchett, who lived on the edge of Colorado’s largest wildfire, has become one of the West’s major voices on environmental issues. Author of five novels, her books have received the PEN USA Award, the High Plains Book Award, the Milkweed National Fiction Prize, the Willa, and several Colorado Book Awards. She is the Director of the MFA in Nature Writing at Western Colorado University and a regular columnist and contributor to major publications in the West.