In 1975 Annie Dillard took up residence on an island in Puget Sound in a wooden room - one enormous window, one cat, one spider and one person. For the next two years she asked herself questions about time, reality, sacrifice and death. In Holy the Firm she writes about a moth consumed in a candle flame, about a seven-year-old girl burned in an aeroplane accident, about a baptism on a cold beach. But behind the moving curtain of what she calls 'the hard things - rock mountain and salt sea', she sees, sometimes far off and sometimes as close by as a veil or air, the power play of holy fire. Holy the Firm is a profound and breath-taking book about the natural world by a Pulitzer Prize winner and one of the most influential figures in contemporary non-fiction.