Contemporary

The Summer’s End, Mary Alice Monroe

In the powerful and heartwarming conclusion to her bestselling Lowcountry Summer trilogy, New York Times author Mary Alice Monroe brings her readers back to the charm and sultry beauty of Sullivan’s Island, South Carolina, to reveal how the pull of family bonds and true love is as strong and steady […]

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The Wolf Border, Sarah Hall

Exploring the fundamental nature of wilderness and wildness, The Wolf Border illuminates both our animal nature and humanity: sex, love, conflict, and the desire to find answers to the question of our existence–the emotions, desires, and needs that rule our lives. Read a review at the New Statesman. Goodreads Reviews […]

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Pescador’s Wake, Katherine Johnson

In this gripping debut novel‚ Katherine Johnson evokes the danger and heartbreak of lives at the mercy of the sea‚ and weaves a breathtaking story of love‚ loss and hope. Goodreads Reviews Back to GoodReads

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Deep River Burning, Donelle Dreese

Denver Oakley’s home town of Adena, Pennsylvania has become a world on fire. The abandoned coal mines underneath the town are a blazing inferno, the escaping smoke and gases killing vegetation and making residents sick. Denver, who recently lost her parents, feels adrift and alone. She sells the family home, […]

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Hoot, Carl Hiaasen

The story takes place in Coconut Cove, Florida, where new arrival Roy makes a bad enemy, two oddball friends, and joins an effort to stop construction of a pancake house which would destroy a colony of burrowing owls who live on the site. The book won a Newberry Honor award […]

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The Waterkeeper’s Daughter, Joan Mauch

Twenty-one year old Annie Whitaker is over the moon: She and Nate, her college sweetheart, have just gotten engaged and she’s driving home to give her parents the news. Not only that, but she’s spending the summer as an intern with her dad, Lake Okeechobee’s waterkeeper. Life just doesn’t get […]

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High Clear Bell of Morning, Ann Eriksson

Elegantly told and affecting, High Clear Bell of Morning illustrates the strain on families facing mental illnesses, and draws attention to the inadequate system that is meant to help. At the same time, it celebrates the natural world and sends a cautionary warning of what we all have to lose. […]

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Falling from Grace, Ann Eriksson

Faye Pearson is a three-and-a-half-foot tall female scientist doing entomological research in the tallest trees on Vancouver Island, who is pit with a ragtag group of protesters against the might of a multinational logging corporation. Goodreads Reviews Back to GoodReads

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Gray Mountain, John Grisham

Her new job takes Samantha into the murky and dangerous world of coal mining, where laws are often broken, rules are ignored, regulations are flouted, communities are divided, and the land itself is under attack from Big Coal. Violence is always just around the corner, and within weeks Samantha finds […]

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Agam, Various Authors

Thanks very much to Red Constantino, from the Institute for Climate and Sustainable Cities–publisher of the new book Agam: Filipino Narratives on Uncertainty and Climate Change–for permissions to excerpt the cover and other information about the book, and for providing assistance in finding out more about this amazing title. Blockquotes […]

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The Wallcreeper, Nell Zink

This is strange, and interesting, but in between is some writing about marriage, love, fidelity, Europe, and saving the earth that is as funny and as grown-up as anything I’ve read in years. -Keith Gessen See FlavorWire for more. Goodreads Reviews Back to GoodReads

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Polly and the One and Only World, Don Bredes

Thanks to author Don Bredes for joining our community discussion group and letting us know about his upcoming YA climate novel. Don Bredes’s new young adult (YA) fantasy is called “Polly and the One and Only World.” Don’s first novel, “Hard Feelings,” was an American Library Association Best Book for […]

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Michael Rothenberg’s Punk Rockwell, Review by Mary Woodbury

Punk Rockwell, by Michael Rothenberg. Review by Mary Woodbury. According to Punk Rockwell‘s narrator Jeffrey Dagovich, poetry takes more than a lifetime to write. Dagovich is a poet (he announces at the beginning of the book), not a novelist. So why is he writing a novel? Slowly, it’s revealed that […]

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Prodigal Summer, Barbara Kingsolver

Prodigal Summer weaves together three stories of human love within a larger tapestry of lives inhabiting the forested mountains and struggling small farms of southern Appalachia. Over the course of one humid summer, these characters find their connections to one another and to the flora and fauna with whom they […]

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