#5 – We Burn Daylight by Bret Anthony Johnston – 2025 Best Reads

It was a good year for books about Texas, always a winner in the Best Reads countdown. Bret Anthony Johnston’s 2024 novel We Burn Daylight takes its title from a Romeo and Juliet quote about wasting time and it’s fair to call this innovative novel R&J meet David Koresh.

Koresh was the leader of the Branch Davidian religious group that came to a flaming end when federal agents stormed their compound near Waco, Texas in the spring of 1993. Allegations of sexual abuse and weapons violations swirled around Koresh but the 51-day federal siege was also controversial.

Johnston doesn’t assume you know this story, despite the coverage at the time and the long shadow Waco has cast on current politics. Instead he turns it into fiction and imagines a burgeoning love story between Jaye, a precocious California teen who follows her mother to Texas when the mother becomes enchanted by the Koresh-like figure who goes by “the Lamb,” and Roy, the young son of the local sheriff who has been trying to find an end to the standoff without a holocaust.

Johnston creates a credible scenario that allows Jaye and Roy to communicate despite the encroaching dragnet that signals the compound’s inevitable doom. Chapters alternate between Jaye and Roy’s perspectives interspersed with transcripts of a 21st century podcast looking back on the episode.

Johnston is a great writer and he effectively depicts the wide-open plains of central Texas as well as the claustrophobic conditions of the siege. You find yourself rooting for the young lovers as the only grounded people in the land.

It’s a great story, well-told and makes it on our list at #5.

Previously in this series:

#6 – Erasure by Percival Everett

#7 – Middlemarch by George Eliot

#8 – Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan

#9 – By the Word Worked by Fleming Rutledge

#10 – Longitude by Dava Sobel