Non-Fiction
| Title | Published | Buy on Amazon |
|---|---|---|
| The Golden Spruce | 2005 | Buy |
| The Tiger | 2010 | Buy |
| Fire Weather | 2023 | Buy |
Standalone Novels
| Title | Published | Buy on Amazon |
|---|---|---|
| The Jaguar’s Children | 2015 | Buy |
John Vaillant is a Canadian journalist and non-fiction author whose work focuses on the intersection of human activity, wildlife, and environmental crisis. He spent years as a magazine journalist before publishing his first book, The Golden Spruce (2005), which examines the logging of a sacred golden spruce tree in British Columbia and the man who destroyed it. The book blends environmental history, Indigenous rights, and the psychology of a singular act of destruction.
His second book, The Tiger (2010), is his most internationally celebrated work. It reconstructs the events surrounding a man-eating Amur tiger in the Russian Far East and the rangers who hunted it, while simultaneously examining the ecological collapse that brought humans and tigers into fatal conflict. The Tiger won the Governor General’s Literary Award for Non-Fiction and established Vaillant as one of the most skilled writers working in the narrative non-fiction tradition.
Fire Weather (2023) is his most recent non-fiction work, examining the 2016 Fort McMurray wildfire in Alberta, one of the most destructive in Canadian history, within the broader context of climate change and the fossil fuel industry. The book was shortlisted for the Pulitzer Prize in General Non-Fiction and won the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction. Vaillant has also published a novel, The Jaguar’s Children (2015), a work of fiction about undocumented migrants crossing from Mexico into the United States.