Articles by: Mary Woodbury

Sky Dance, John D. Burns

Full title: Sky Dance: Fighting for the Wild in the Scottish Highlands In his first two bestselling books, The Last Hillwalker and Bothy Tales, John D. Burns invited readers to join him in the hills and wild places of Scotland. In Sky Dance, he returns to that world to ask […]

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Fauna, Christiane Vadnais

Translator, Pablo Strauss. A thick fog rolls in over Shivering Heights. The river overflows, the sky is streaked with toxic green, parasites proliferate in torrential rains and once safely classified species–humans included–are evolving and behaving in unprecedented ways. Against this poetically hostile backdrop, a biologist, Laura, fights to understand the […]

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Crosshairs, Catherine Hernandez

Set in a terrifyingly familiar near-future, with massive floods leading to rampant homelessness and devastation, a government-sanctioned regime called The Boots seizes on the opportunity to round up communities of color, the disabled, and the LGBTQ+ into labor camps. Goodreads Reviews Back to GoodReads

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Backyard Wildlife: The End of Summer

Back to Series Last night my husband and I sat in the living room discussing plans for the house. Surrounding us were the cozy warmth of our new wood stove, the fairy lights strung about the bay window and around the room, the sound of crickets coming from the open […]

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Mottainai: A Journey in Search of the Zero Waste Life, Virginia Aronson

Author: © Virginia Aronson Type: Fiction Novel Publisher/Ordering: Dixi Books Publication Date: October 2019 Author Links: Website, Instagram Book Description Mottainai means waste. Popular with the Japanese for generations, mottainai (pronounced moe-tie-nye) is the Buddhist term for essence. One can say mottainai and mean “waste nothing.” Or, if something appears […]

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Italy Part 2: Maurizio Corrado, Laura Pugno, Claudio Morandini

Click here to return to the series In August, I kicked off two parts of a feature that heads to Italy to talk with novelists there who tackle climate change and ecological themes in their fiction. Thanks to Antonia Santopietro for her collaboration on these features. Today we publish the […]

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Water Must Fall, Nick Wood

This is the story of people struggling with a climate situation that is out of their control. It’s a situation that soon may become universal, so there’s an extra edge to this novel that makes it especially compelling. -Kim Stanley Robinson Goodreads Reviews Back to GoodReads

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The Swimmers, Marian Womack

A claustrophobic, literary dystopia set in the hot, luscious landscape of Andalusia from the author of The Golden Key. After the ravages of global warming, this is place of deep jungles, strange animals, and new taxonomies. Social inequality has ravaged society, now divided into surface dwellers and people who live […]

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El Taller de las Mariposas, Giocanda Belli

For children and adults alike, Odair, one of the “Designers of All Things” and grandson of the esteemed inventor of the rainbow, has been banished to the insect laboratory as punishment for his overactive imagination. But he still dreams of one day creating a cross between a bird and a […]

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The Island Will Sink, Briohny Doyle

In a not-too-distant future perpetually on the brink of collapse, catastrophe is our most popular entertainment. The energy crisis has come and gone. EcoLaw is enforced by insidious cartoon panda bears and their armies of viral-marketing children. The world watches as Pitcairn Island sinks into the Pacific, wondering if this, […]

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The Best Part of Us, Sally Cole-Misch

Author: © Sally Cole-Misch Type: Fiction Novel Publisher/Ordering: She Writes Press Publication Date: September 8, 2020 Author Links: Website, Instagram, Twitter, Facebook Throughout her career, author Sally Cole-Misch has advocated for progressive environmental conservation and policy, urging people to recognize the value of nature in their lives in order to […]

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Death of a River Guide, Richard Flanagan

Aljaz Cosini is leading a group of tourists on a raft tour down Tasmania’s wild Franklin River when his greatest fear is realized—a tourist falls overboard. An ordinary man with many regrets, Aljaz rises to an uncharacteristic heroism, and offers his own life in trade. Trapped under a rapid and […]

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Betty, Tiffany McDaniel

“A girl comes of age against the knife.” So begins the story of Betty Carpenter. Born in a bathtub in 1954 to a Cherokee father and white mother, Betty is the sixth of eight siblings. The world they inhabit is one of poverty and violence–both from outside the family, and […]

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The Veins of the Ocean, Patricia Engel

Set in the vibrant coastal and Caribbean communities of Miami, the Florida Keys, Havana, Cuba, and Cartagena, Colombia, with The Veins of the Ocean Patricia Engel delivers a profound and riveting Pan-American story of fractured lives finding solace and redemption in the beauty and power of the natural world, and […]

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