John Vaillant’s Fire Weather: The Making of a Beast (Knopf Canada) has been nominated as one of two finalists for the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction books.

Vaillant’s Fire Weather, subtitled A True Story from a Hotter World for the U.S. edition (Knopf), is nominated along with Cobalt Red: How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives by Siddharth Kara. The nominees are announced at the same time as the winner.

The winner of the 2024 general nonfiction prize is Nathan Thrall for A Day in the Life of Abed Salama: Anatomy of a Jerusalem Tragedy.

The Pulitzer nomination calls Fire Weather “an unsparing account of the rapacious Alberta Sands fire, fueled by an overheated atmosphere, dry forest and omnipresent petroleum products, that consumed the town of Fort McMurray at the heart of Canada’s oil industry, which brings the global crisis of carbon emissions and climate change into urgent relief.”