It’s this restraint - as intelligent as it is compassionate - that elevates The Arsonist from slick true-crime procedural to cultural time capsule. The elemental terror of Black Saturday requires little embellishment, only the quiet dignity of witness. But first, Hooper takes us into the belly of the beast: birds falling from the sky with their wings burning beehives combusting from the radiant heat farewell texts escaping from fire-ravaged homes. With propulsive energy, The Arsonist follows the case against Sokaluk, a 39-year-old former volunteer firefighter, from the arson investigation’s first frantic hours to the courtroom verdict. Chloe Hooper, The arsonist: A mind on fire (BookReview) Janu/ whisperinggums It may not have been the most sensible decision to read Chloe Hooper’s book, The arsonist, during Australia’s worst-ever bushfire week, but in fact I picked it up a few days before the crisis became evident, and once I started I couldn’t put it down. The latest book by the Australian writer tells the story of just one of the Black Saturday bushfires, a blaze deliberately lit on the outskirts of Churchill in the Latrobe Valley - coal country. We speak of flanks, fingers, tails and tongues, Chloe Hooper observes in The Arsonist, of a predatory, devouring hunger. To describe a bushfire is to describe a monster.
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