Firebrand by Joshua Knelman

“One of the year’s most remarkable books.” —Toronto Star

Mad Men meets Bad Blood in this addictive, behind-the-scenes globe-trotting narrative of moral ambiguity, law, public policy, and big tobacco.

It’s the start of the new millennium and a young lawyer is recruited to work for an unnamed multinational company. It isn’t until his second interview that the product the company produces is revealed to him: cigarettes. Possibly the most controversial consumer product in human history: seductive, addictive, and deadly—yet completely legal. Over the next decade, he travels the world as he works as legal counsel to successfully market cigarettes in dozens of countries.

Firebrand ventures into the heart of the tobacco industry and the icy paradoxes of capitalism, each chapter a counterintuitive lesson on how cigarette companies, the target of anti-smoking campaigns by health authorities, pivoted and recovered after the seismic 1964 Surgeon General’s Report and 200-billion-dollar debt of the 1998 Master Settlement Agreement—and are now thriving, drenched in profits from their one billion smokers worldwide. As Mad Men did for the alcohol-fuelled, oversexed, corrupt world of New York advertising, Firebrand does for the even more despised world of big tobacco, in an addictive piece of storytelling that spans the globe. The lawyer’s work takes him from manufacturing factories to hocking “sticks” at UK corner store counters; from tacky resorts in Spain and pirate city-states to luxury hotels and Grand Prix events across European and Asian cities. A contemporary tale of our ambiguous times, told through the eyes of an anti-hero created by our corporate age.

Written with the character-based gusto and narrative flare akin to Michael Lewis, and the behind-the-scenes intrigue of Bad Blood and Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, Firebrand is a compelling paradox of corporate responsibility, public health, and an engrossing tale of a morally dubious yet completely legal enterprise.

Story Locale: Across the globe

JOSHUA KNELMANis an award-winning arts and investigative journalist and editor. He was a founding member of The Walrus magazine. His writing has appeared in The Walrus, Toronto Life, TORO, Saturday Night, CBCarts.ca, National Post, Quill & Quire, and The Globe and Mail. His debut true crime bestseller, Hot Art, won both the Arthur Ellis Award and the Edna Staebler Award and was successfully published in Canada, the US, and Korea, with attention from Vanity Fair to Details to Playboy Magazine. His first book, the co-edited anthology Four Letter Word, sold in ten countries across various publishers. Knelman lives in Toronto.

Author Residence: Toronto