In his scintillating debut, John Pipkin fictionalizes an ignoble event in noted naturalist Henry David Thoreau's life. One year before his historic retreat to the woods around Walden pond, Thoreau struck a match and carelessly started a mammoth fire that would go on to consume 300 acres of forest and farmland. "A superb historical fiction as well as a complex and provocative novel of ideas-Pulitzer Prize material."-Kirkus Reviews, starred review