Contemporary

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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The Only Good Indians, Stephen Graham Jones

This book follows four childhood friends ten years after an elk hunt gone wrong. Some of them leave the rez, while others stay, and the spirit of Elk Head Woman is seeking revenge against them all. The book has blood and gore, thrilling chase scenes and suspenseful psychological horror. But […]

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Depart, Depart!, Sim Kern

Depart, Depart! grapples with intersections of social justice and climate change, asking readers to consider how they’ll react when the world changes in an instant. Who will we turn to? What will we take with us, and what will we have to leave behind? In our rapidly changing world, these […]

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Summerwater, Sarah Moss

…are brief chapters comprising lyrical and often ominous reports of the wildlife surrounding the human-made structures: the natural world is quietly suffering due to excessive changes in weather. –Prospect Magazine, UK On the longest day of the summer, twelve people sit cooped up with their families in a faded Scottish […]

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The Disaster Tourist, Yun Ko-eun

In this entertaining eco-thriller, the heroine curates holiday packages in disaster zones. –The Guardian An eco-thriller with a fierce feminist sensibility, The Disaster Tourist engages with the global dialog around climate activism, dark tourism, and the #MeToo movement…In The Disaster Tourist, Korean author Yun Ko-eun grapples with the consequences of […]

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Summer Constellations, Alisha Sevigny

Young Adult Fiction Reviewed by Kimberly Christensen The summer after senior year of high school should be full of magic, but for Julia Ducharme, it’s full of worry. Julia’s younger brother Caleb is still convalescing from a serious illness, her former summer fling has a new girlfriend and to top […]

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The Octopus and I, Erin Hortle

A stunning debut novel set on the Tasmanian coast that lays bare the wild, beating heart at the intersection of human and animal, love and loss, and fear and hope. Goodreads Reviews Back to Goodreads

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On Ocean Boulevard, Mary Alice Monroe

Like the sea turtles that come ashore annually on these windswept islands, three generations of the Rutledge family experience a season of return, rebirth, and growth. Part of the Beach House series. Goodreads Reviews Back to Goodreads

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The Golden Rule, Amanda Craig

Earnest economic expositions and detours on “the national quarrel” over leaving the EU, along with marriage’s financial disadvantages for women and the damage done to the Cornish landscape by climate change, sit side-by-side with what Hannah refers to self-consciously as “the murder plot”. –The Guardian Goodreads Reviews Back to Goodreads

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Blaze Island, Catherine Bush

Climate change is both an external and internal phenomenon in Catherine Bush’s brilliant new novel, Blaze Island. Set on an island off the coast of Newfoundland, its cast of characters includes a renegade climate scientist and his young daughter Miranda. They are self-made castaways who can’t get far enough away […]

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Seasonal Series, Ali Smith

Echoing Keats’s famous ode, the book is punctuated by placid country scenes of grain being harvested, birds flying south, days growing shorter and nights longer and colder. So familiar is this picture of autumnal transformation that readers are easily lulled into a false sense of comfort. But it slowly becomes […]

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Limbo: A Novel about Jamaica, Esther Figueroa

Flora Smith, Jamaican scientist and head of tiny NGO Environment Now, dedicates her life to getting Jamaicans to care about the natural environment. At the opening of Limbo, Flora is confronted by the nagging reality of not having enough money to keep her organization afloat. When sand is stolen from […]

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Tiger Boy, Mitali Perkins

When a tiger cub escapes from a nature reserve near Neel’s island village, the rangers and villagers hurry to find her before the cub’s anxious mother follows suit and endangers them all. Mr. Gupta, a rich newcomer to the island, is also searching—he wants to sell the cub’s body parts […]

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The Unpassing, Chia-Chia Lin

With flowing prose that evokes the terrifying beauty of the Alaskan wilderness, Lin explores the fallout after the loss of a child and the way in which a family is forced to grieve in a place that doesn’t yet feel like home. Emotionally raw and subtly suspenseful, The Unpassing is […]

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