Contemporary

Heart Spring Mountain, Robin MacArthur

This week the author is reaping praise upon the release of “Heart Spring Mountain,” which tackles global warming — as well as heroin addiction and women’s struggles — at the most local level. “The resulting narrative is nuanced, poetic, and evocative,” Publishers Weekly said in a starred review. “MacArthur empathetically […]

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Swarga, Ambikasutan Mangad

Translated from the Malayalam, this novel transforms an environmental movement against Endosulfan, a pesticide used in north Kerala, into a fable of great power. Man and Woman, in retreat from the world, live in an almost magical forest, looking after a sick child till they find a whole population poisoned […]

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Bonfire, Krysten Ritter

The protagonist of “Bonfire” is Abby Williams, an environmental lawyer in Chicago who returns to her modest hometown of fictional Barrens, Ind., to investigate a case against Optimal Plastics, a conglomerate intertwined in seemingly every aspect of the community. –New York Times It has been ten years since Abby Williams […]

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The Ocean Container, Patrik Sampler

Thanks to the author for bringing this book to our attention. First it’s about climate change and the hostility Canada has shown toward those wishing to do something about it. It’s also about the role of artists at a time of political crisis. And it’s psychological, exploring the mind of […]

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Radio Free Vermont: A Fable of Resistance, Bill McKibben

This is surprisingly new territory for McKibben, the environmental journalist who raised the alarm about global warming with “The End of Nature” way back in 1989. But three decades later, we’ve got 15 percent more CO2 in the atmosphere and a fossil-fuel toady dismantling the Environmental Protection Agency, so maybe […]

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Rain Birds, Harriet McKnight

This novel is an example of an emerging form in literature: the realist novel in which climate change is no longer science fiction but already an integral part of the real and familiar world. –The Sydney Morning Herald Rain Birds is a powerful and lyrical novel about love, grief and […]

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George’s Secret Key to the Universe, Lucy Hawkins and Stephen Hawking

Father and daughter team up in series, where science meets fiction. Beginning in 2007, this series is ongoing. Hawking emphasises the great need for general scientific education “because the challenges we now face are global”. “The answers to our problems, whether they’re climate change, desertification or ocean pollution will be […]

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Our Memory Like Dust, Gavin Chait

  Chait follows three main characters through a brilliantly imagined near-future Africa ravaged by war, climate change, jihadi cults and multinational companies…He interweaves ecological and political intrigue with Senegalese folk myths to tell the ultimately uplifting story of a continent sadly neglected in SF. –The Guardian‘s best science fiction, fantasy, […]

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Devil’s Day, Andrew Michael Hurley

The new gothic accepts input from many sources: from industrial archaeology to ecofiction, from contemporary nature writing to the brutalism associated with film-maker Ben Wheatley or novelist Ben Myers. It draws as much from children’s fiction, folk music and horror cinema of the 1960s and 70s as it does from more traditionally […]

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Parts Per Million, Julia Stoops

Parts per Million, the debut novel by Julia Stoops, is forthcoming April 2018. The manuscript was a finalist for the PEN/Bellwether Prize. Three activists let a photographer with a hazy past join their unorthodox household in Julia Stoops’s debut novel, a finalist for the PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction. As […]

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The Skeleton Tree, Iain Lawrence

The Skeleton Tree is a survival tale that tracks two boys who need to quickly learn how to survive in the wilderness when their boat sinks off the coast of Alaska. The Skeleton Tree is a finalist for the 2017 TD Canadian Children’s Literature Award. –CBC Books Goodreads Reviews Back to Goodreads

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The Crows of Beara, Julie Christine Johnson

Beautifully crafted with environmental themes, a lyrical Irish setting, and a touch of magical realism, The Crows of Beara is a breathtaking novel of how the nature of place encompasses everything that we are. Goodreads Reviews Back to Goodreads

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Salvage the Bones, Jesmyn Ward

“Salvage the Bones” expands our understanding of Katrina’s devastation, beyond the pictures of choked rooftops in New Orleans and toward the washed-out, feral landscapes elsewhere along the coast. Ward’s regionalism, grounded in rurality and in poverty, gives us the images—often beautiful, always barely hiding danger—that recur throughout her books: shushing […]

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My Absolute Darling, Gabriel Tallent

Booksellers have chosen Gabriel Tallent’s harrowing debut novel, My Absolute Darling (Riverhead Books), as the number-one September Indie Next List pick…This is a Great American Novel. Exquisitely lush language of the natural world; startlingly vivid characters; a global understanding of social context, in a particular place; and, in this case, […]

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Whipbird, Robert Drewe

In Whipbird, Robert Drewe pulls no punches. Nothing is sacred as he takes on the mining boom and conservationists; everyone from investment bankers and real-estate agents to sea-changers and tree-changers, vegans and paleo practitioners, First World smugness, global warming, retirement, divorce, death, sudoko and artisan brewers. And the nonchalant disrespect […]

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