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Arson
244 pages, Hardcover
Published December 1, 2025
2 people want to read
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July 12, 2025
Book Review: Arson by Laura Freudenthaler (Translated by Tess Lewis)
Rating: 4.5/5
Laura Freudenthaler’s Arson is a searing, poetic meditation on climate collapse that lingers like smoke long after the final page. Told through the fragmented perspectives of an anxious writer and a data-obsessed scientist, this novel doesn’t just describe environmental devastation—it embodies it, with prose that flickers between lyrical beauty and visceral panic. As wildfires rage beyond the page, I found myself equally mesmerized and unsettled by Freudenthaler’s ability to mirror our collective climate grief in the characters’ fractured psyches.
The novel’s greatest strength is its formal daring. The alternating narratives—one dreamlike and introspective, the other clinically precise—create a dissonance that perfectly captures humanity’s paralyzed response to crisis. A passage where the scientist’s wildfire statistics bleed into the narrator’s apocalyptic dreams left me breathless; it’s rare to find climate fiction that feels so psychologically true. Tess Lewis’s translation deserves special praise for preserving the German text’s haunting rhythm. That said, the novel’s deliberate fragmentation may frustrate readers craving linear storytelling—though this seems intentional, a formal rebellion against tidy narratives about an unraveling world.
By the end, Arson left me with a paradoxical ache: devastation at its bleak vision, yet weirdly comforted by its artistic courage. This isn’t a warning about the future; it’s a mirror held to our present denial.
Summary Takeaways:
-A literary inferno—Arson burns away clichés about climate fiction with prose as beautiful as it is brutal.
-If The Overstory met Annihilation in a burning forest: Freudenthaler’s novel is the haunting lovechild.
-For fans of Jenny Offill’s Weather—but with more fire, more fever, and twice the existential dread.
-The first great novel of climate grief: Arson doesn’t predict disaster—it lives it, page by scorched page.
-You’ll smell smoke after reading. A masterpiece of ecological unease, translated with crystalline precision.
Thank you to the University of Chicago Press and Edelweiss for the advance copy. Arson is essential reading in our pyrocene age—a novel that stares into the flames and finds art in the ashes.
Rating: 4.5/5
Laura Freudenthaler’s Arson is a searing, poetic meditation on climate collapse that lingers like smoke long after the final page. Told through the fragmented perspectives of an anxious writer and a data-obsessed scientist, this novel doesn’t just describe environmental devastation—it embodies it, with prose that flickers between lyrical beauty and visceral panic. As wildfires rage beyond the page, I found myself equally mesmerized and unsettled by Freudenthaler’s ability to mirror our collective climate grief in the characters’ fractured psyches.
The novel’s greatest strength is its formal daring. The alternating narratives—one dreamlike and introspective, the other clinically precise—create a dissonance that perfectly captures humanity’s paralyzed response to crisis. A passage where the scientist’s wildfire statistics bleed into the narrator’s apocalyptic dreams left me breathless; it’s rare to find climate fiction that feels so psychologically true. Tess Lewis’s translation deserves special praise for preserving the German text’s haunting rhythm. That said, the novel’s deliberate fragmentation may frustrate readers craving linear storytelling—though this seems intentional, a formal rebellion against tidy narratives about an unraveling world.
By the end, Arson left me with a paradoxical ache: devastation at its bleak vision, yet weirdly comforted by its artistic courage. This isn’t a warning about the future; it’s a mirror held to our present denial.
Summary Takeaways:
-A literary inferno—Arson burns away clichés about climate fiction with prose as beautiful as it is brutal.
-If The Overstory met Annihilation in a burning forest: Freudenthaler’s novel is the haunting lovechild.
-For fans of Jenny Offill’s Weather—but with more fire, more fever, and twice the existential dread.
-The first great novel of climate grief: Arson doesn’t predict disaster—it lives it, page by scorched page.
-You’ll smell smoke after reading. A masterpiece of ecological unease, translated with crystalline precision.
Thank you to the University of Chicago Press and Edelweiss for the advance copy. Arson is essential reading in our pyrocene age—a novel that stares into the flames and finds art in the ashes.
Displaying 1 of 1 review