One man saw his beehives combust from the sheer heat. Hooper’s descriptions of the fire, taken from witness statements, are particularly powerful. It’s written in a clear but lyrical style with a journalist’s eye for detail.

The book, which is essentially a true crime tale, is divided into three parts covering the police investigation into the fire, the defence lawyers’ case and the court proceedings. That man, who was sentenced to 17 years in prison three years later, is the subject of Chloe Hooper’s extraordinary new book, The Arsonist: A Mind on Fire, which was longlisted for the 2019 Stella Prize. It later transpired that the Churchill fire, which started in a pine plantation, was deliberately lit and a 39-year-old Churchill man was arrested on suspicion of arson. On that particular Saturday - which later became known as Black Saturday - the Central Gippsland fires in and around the Latrobe Valley (just a 45 minute drive from where I grew up) burnt 32,860 hectares and killed 11 people. One-hundred and eighty people lost their lives, making them the deadliest fires in Australian history. Ten years ago, on 7 February 2009, in unprecedented hot weather conditions, a series of bushfires - 400 separate fires giving off the heat equivalent of 500 atomic bombs! - raged across the state of Victoria, wiping out everything in their path, including whole townships and hundreds and thousands of hectares of farmland and bushland. Non-fiction – paperback Hamish Hamilton 272 pages 2018.

The arsonist chloe hooper