Aged 18, Rio Matchett burned down a church.

She still does not know why.

Pyromaniac – the first ever published personal account from someone with the diagnosis – is Rio’s account of falling insane, being sectioned, and then incarcerated for arson, and the story of her search to understand humanity’s enduring and ubiquitous fascination with fire. The book spans genres, blending memoir with history, anthropology, psychology, myth and literature, confronting what happens when you find yourself alone, beyond the bounds of the explicable.

It is a pleasure to burn, as Ray Bradbury so famously wrote. But why? It is a curse and a blessing, a fuel and a conflagration, a source of warmth, safety and destruction. Weaving through these themes, the book explores fire as a mercurial metaphor for knowledge, technology, progress, and reprises distant stories from across cultures to demonstrate that fire is what took us from inanimate clay to humankind. When we master fire, we’re almost gods. No fire, no soul. No soul, no us. Surely, fire is what we are?

Fire also brought Rio Matchett’s young life close to ruin. With an honesty and rigour so rare to find in contemporary writing, Rio uses her story to ask fundamental questions about what she did, about her mental breakdown and diagnosis as a pyromaniac, and about what might have been done differently by the systems that punished her. Rio’s depiction of her life in prison is unforgettable, but ultimately, Pyromaniac is a story of love driving recovery, the vital role of friendship on the path to redemption, and the enduring flicker of human hope.