Introduction
Our House Is on Fire scenes of a family and a planet in crisis. It is the story of Greta Thunberg’s family, focusing on the harrowing years that preceded the Nobel Peace Prize nominee’s time in the spotlight as an environmental activist. It’s both an intimate personal story and a call to action. Its message is hard to ignore.
This story, Greta’s mother, Malena Ernman writes, is “about the crisis that struck our family.” But, she adds, “above all, it’s about the crisis that surrounds and affects us all. The one we humans have created through our way of life: beyond sustainability, divorced from nature, to which we all belong. Some call it overconsumption, others call it a climate crisis. The vast majority seem to think this crisis is happening somewhere far away from here, and that it won’t affect us for a very long time yet. But that’s not true. Because it’s already here and it’s happening around us all the time, in so many different ways. At the breakfast table, in school corridors, along streets, in houses and apartments. In the trees outside your window, in the wind that ruffles your hair.”
When climate activist Greta Thunberg was eleven, her parents Malena and Svante, and her little sister Beata, were facing a crisis in their own home. Greta had stopped eating and speaking, and her mother and father had reconfigured their lives to care for her. Desperate and searching for answers, her parents discovered what was at the heart of Greta’s distress: her imperilled future on a rapidly heating planet.
Steered by Greta’s determination to understand the truth and generate change, they began to see the deep connections between their own suffering and the planet’s. Written by a remarkable family and told through the voice of an iconoclastic mother, Our House Is on Fire is the story of how they fought their problems at home by taking global action. And it is the story of how Greta decided to go on strike from school, igniting a worldwide rebellion.
About the Author of Our House is on Fire
Greta Thunberg is a climate crisis activist from Sweden. In August 2018, she decided not to go to school one day, starting a strike outside the Swedish Parliament. Her actions sparked a global movement to fight the climate crisis, inspiring millions of students to go on strike for our planet. Greta has Asperger's and considers it a gift that has enabled her to see the climate crisis in "black and white." She has won the prestigious Prix Liberté, has been nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize, and was selected as Time's Person of the Year in 2019. She is the author of the New York Times bestseller No One Is Too Small to Make a Difference.
Together with her mother, the celebrated opera singer Malena Ernman, her sister, Beata Ernman, and her father, Svante Thunberg, she has dedicated her life to protecting the living planet.
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Praise on Our House is on Fire
“[Our House Is on Fire] feels like a new form of nonfiction, intimate and approachable as a photo album: a family memoir. . . . This is also a remarkable story of togetherness: a modern family shifting and pivoting to keep each person afloat.” —The New Republic
An urgent, lucid, courageous account. . . . [E]veryone with an interest in the future of the planet should read this book. It is a clear-headed diagnosis. It is a glimpse of a saner world. It is fertile with hope.” —The Guardian
“An extraordinary account of how one family rose, with unshakable moral clarity, to the tremendous responsibility of being alive at the moment when our immediate collective decisions will determine the fate of life on Earth. They share their story of courage not because they want our accolades, but because they demand our company. Greta Thunberg has already inspired a global moment–this book is part of how we will win.” —Naomi Klein
“A surprisingly funny and optimistic book. Thunberg and her family might be screaming ‘FIRE’ on a crowded planet. But they believe we have the power to put that fire out if we act, right here, right now.” —The Telegraph (UK)
“A book about finding purpose as a route to recovery.” —Sunday Times (UK)
“This blazingly candid family memoir reveals the gruelling and bewildering struggles that propelled Greta onto the world stage. . . . An unnerving and profoundly enlightening chronicle of the symbiosis between human and planetary health as manifest within one remarkable family whose painful awakening to our ‘acute sustainability crisis’ should embolden us all.” —Booklist, starred review
“An impassioned call to action and a vulnerable family portrait of neurodiversity.” —Kirkus
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