Emma Kavanagh’s Every Time We Burn is a thrilling family drama set in a coastal Californian town in the path of a wildfire.
On the anniversary of her mother’s death, Robyn’s birth father is desperate to speak to her. When she arrives at his house, she finds him dead.
When Robyn next wakes, everything has changed. Her father is alive. She was never adopted. And there’s no sign of the fire on the ridge.
If Robyn can’t uncover the truth, everything she thought she knew about herself and her family might go up in smoke.
Every Time We Burn has two timelines running throughout the novel and, interestingly, the answers to the events in one timeline might well lie in the other. Will Robyn figure out what’s happening and solve the mystery before the fire wipes out her town and destroys any evidence? (And, no, I’m not going to tell you. You’ll have to read the book to find out.)
I loved the main character, Robyn, in both iterations of this novel. It was relatively straightforward to keep them distinct from each other because of how much their lives diverged but they do have different names, as well. It did take a little while to settle into the switches between the two versions of Destino but Emma Kavanagh uses the ‘Sliding Doors’-esque narrative to great effect here: each had its pros and cons, and I had great fun weighing one against the other while enjoying the story.
Robyn’s birth father, Mack, is a firefighter and him being alive in one version and dead in the other is clearly at the heart of the mystery. What really adds to the sense of a clock ticking down on the town and also on Robyn’s investigation is the very real danger of the fire licking about the town in one of its timelines. You feel the rush of time running out and the very real jeopardy she and the town are in, as you sense the fire drawing nearer to the town and its buildings. Will Robyn make it out unscathed?
Alongside Robyn and Mack, there’s a strong cast of supporting characters, who each have their own stories. Everybody else, including local law enforcement, is more worried about the fire and saving themselves and their families, and whatever they can grab from their homes before leaving Destino, than Mack’s suspicious death.
Emma Kavanagh brings the small coastal town of Destiny vividly to life. I could taste the ocean, smell the pine trees and sense how hot and dry it has become. Destino is perched up high on cliffs and boxed in by mountains: a tinder box waiting for its spark.
If you’ve ever wondered how differently things might have panned out, Every Time We Burn is the book for you. I loved every minute of Emma Kavanagh’s novel and raced through it, gulping down one chapter after another, and desperately hoping that we’d all outrun the fire that was tearing through it.
Every Time We Burn by Emma Kavanagh is published by Orion Books and is available as an audiobook, ebook, in hardback (as The Time of the Fire) and in paperback. You can buy it from Amazon UK (affiliate link), Bookshop.org (affiliate link) or Waterstones. It is the Waterstones Welsh Book of the Month for March 2026.
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