By Jane Southward -
It’s almost a decade since the “Black Saturday” bushfires devastated parts of Victoria and killed 173 people in 2009, in what was Australia’s worst recorded natural disaster. This powerful account focuses on the Churchill fires in central Victoria, in which 10 people died and 156 homes were destroyed. It’s the second non-fiction work from Hooper who shot to literary fame in 2002 with her debut novel, A Child’s Book of True Crime. Her other non-fiction book, The Tall Man, looked at the death in custody of an Aboriginal man on Queensland’s Palm Island and won many awards.
