Articles by: Mary Woodbury

The Impossible Resurrection of Grief, Octavia Cade

A chilling novella about extinction, grief, and what we hold onto when the world falls apart. With the collapse of ecosystems and the extinction of species comes the Grief: an unstoppable melancholia that ends in suicide. When Ruby’s friend, mourning the loss of the Great Barrier Reef, succumbs to the […]

Read More

Mad Honey, Katie Welch

Katie Welch reminds us that we are a very small part of a massive and complex non-human world and that, where we heed the lessons of non-centrality, we can also truly love. Mad Honey is a beautiful novel. –Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer, author of Perfecting and All the Broken Things When Beck Wise vanished, his […]

Read More

The House of Drought, Dennis Mombauer

I’m eagerly awaiting The House of Drought, which comes this summer of 2022 from one of my favorite publishing houses, Stelliform Press: The House of Drought is a weird horror novella which Mombauer pitched during December 2020’s #PitMad Twitter pitch contest. The story delves deep into the destabilizations of climate […]

Read More

A House Between Earth and the Moon, Rebecca Scherm

A novel born out of speculation about climate change, this tale has the richest billionaire’s going to live on the moon while the rest suffer on an ecologically burnt Earth. Prescient and insightful, A House Between Earth and the Moon is at once a captivating epic about the machinations of big […]

Read More

Scattered All Over the Earth, Yoko Tawada

Welcome to the not-too-distant future: Japan, having vanished from the face of the earth, is now remembered as “the land of sushi.” Hiruko, its former citizen and a climate refugee herself, has a job teaching immigrant children in Denmark with her invented language Panska (Pan-Scandinavian): “homemade language. no country to […]

Read More

Hovering, Rhett Davis

The Guardian calls Hovering a climate-collapse novel. A spectacular debut novel from one of Australia’s most exciting new writers. Winner of the Victorian Premier’s Unpublished Manuscript Award, Hovering crosses genres, literary styles and conventions to create a powerful and kaleidoscopic story about three people struggling to find connection in a chaotic and […]

Read More

Pure Colour, Sheila Heti

Pure Colour is a galaxy of a novel: explosive, celestially bright, huge, and streaked with beauty. It is a contemporary bible, an atlas of feeling, and an absurdly funny guide to the great (and terrible) things about being alive. Sheila Heti is a philosopher of modern experience, and she has […]

Read More

Backyard Wildlife – Back to the Garden

Back to Series Actually, it’s not quite back to the garden yet. It’s too early to even order soil yet. I’ve done some mint and jasmine shopping lately but haven’t found what I wanted and will probably wait until more plants are at the local nursery around Mother’s Day weekend. […]

Read More

The Year’s Best African Speculative Fiction, Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki

Click here to return to the series About the Book Occasionally, the world eco-fiction series explores anthologies and interviews editors who produce them; today we’re talking with author Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki, editor of The Year’s Best African Speculative Fiction. The description of the book from the publisher, Jembefola, is: The […]

Read More

Strange Fire, Joel Burcat – Book Review

Strange Fire Book Review Reviewed by Mary Woodbury Book information Author: Joel Burcat Publisher: Headline Books Publication date: February 2, 2022 Who better to write an ecologically based legal thriller than environmental lawyer Joel Burcat? As with his newest book Strange Fire, two of his previous novels, Drink to Every […]

Read More

Grey Bees, Andrey Kurkov

Little Starhorodivka, a village of three streets, lies in Ukraine’s Grey Zone, the no-man’s-land between loyalist and separatist forces. Thanks to the lukewarm war of sporadic violence and constant propaganda that has been dragging on for years, only two residents remain: retired safety inspector turned beekeeper Sergey Sergeyich and Pashka, […]

Read More

The Doloriad, Missouri Williams

In the wake of a mysterious environmental cataclysm that has wiped out the rest of humankind, the Matriarch, her brother, and the family descended from their incest cling to existence on the edges of a deserted city. The Matriarch, ruling with fear and force, dreams of starting humanity over again, […]

Read More

Indie Corner – Todd Mitchell

Back to the Indie Corner series Rebooted for the Indie Corner, I was so happy to read Todd Mitchell’s fantastic children’s book–for ages nine and up–The Last Panther (Penguin Random House, 2019). Todd and I talked about his endearing novel, set in future Florida. About The Last Panther When eleven-year-old […]

Read More

Eleutheria, Allegra Hyde

“Allegra Hyde’s seductive first novel tackles the big stuff of climate change and the more intimate matter of heartbreak with grace. Indeed, Eleutheria bravely braids these together, the story of a lost soul moving through the world we’re rapidly losing.” —Rumaan Alam, author of Leave the World Behind

Read More

After the Dragons, Cynthia Zhang

Click here to return to the series About the Book This month we head to Beijing, China, as we talk with Cynthia Zhang about her newest novel, After the Dragons (Stelliform Press, 2021). Dragons were fire and terror to the Western world, but in the East they brought life-giving rain…Now, […]

Read More