Cultural/Regional

Spotlight – The Storm, Arif Anwar

Click here to return to the world eco-fiction series About the Book     At once grounded in history and fantastically imaginative, Arif Anwar’s The Storm (Washington Square Press, 2021) “moves us deftly through time and across borders, beautifully illustrating the strange intersections we call fate, and reminding us how […]

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Stolen, Ann-Helén Laestadius

Translated by Rachel Willson-Broyles. Soon to be a Netflix film: Louise Erdrich meets Jo Nesbø in this spellbinding Swedish novel that follows a young indigenous woman as she struggles to defend her family’s reindeer herd and culture amidst xenophobia, climate change, and a devious hunter whose targeted kills are considered […]

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Haven, Emma Donoghue

In seventh-century Ireland, a scholar and priest called Artt has a dream telling him to leave the sinful world behind. Taking two monks—young Trian and old Cormac—he rows down the river Shannon in search of an isolated spot on which to found a monastery. Drifting out into the Atlantic, the […]

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Moon of the Turning Leaves, Waubgeshig Rice

Updated from original post: More info is out now, including a beautiful cover! I interviewed Waub Rice, who said that the sequel to Moon of the Crusted Snow is Moon of the Turning Leaves and that: It takes place ten years after the end of Moon of the Crusted Snow. […]

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Pink Slime, Fernanda Trías

Winner of the Uruguayan National Literature Prize for Fiction, the Bartolomé-Hidalgo Fiction Prize, and the Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Literature Prize. A port city is in the grips of an ecological crisis. The river has filled with toxic algae, and a deadly ‘red wind’ blows through its streets; […]

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The Water Diviner, Zahran Alqasmi

The Water Diviner won the 2023 International Prize for Arabic Fiction (IPAF), and through IPAF will receive an English translation. According to Emerites 24/7: The Water Diviner by Zahran Alqasmi explores a new subject in modern fiction: water and its impact on the natural environment and the lives of human […]

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Everything the Light Touches, Janice Pariat

Drawn richly from scientific and botanical ideas, Everything the Light Touches is a swirl of ever-expanding themes: the contrasts between modern India and its colonial past, urban and rural life, capitalism and centuries-old traditions of generosity and gratitude, script and “song and stone.” Pulsating at its center is the dichotomy […]

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Black River, Nilanjana S. Roy

For the most part, Delhi turns its back on her, staining her swollen body with its ashes and garbage and sewage, choking her with the city’s waste, its discards, its corpses and diseases,” writes Nilanjana Roy in Black River. –The Print India This shockingly powerful literary thriller is set in […]

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The Last Polar Bear, Dana Rodney

The Last Polar Bear is part wildlife adventure, part nature narrative, and a thought-provoking story of the Arctic’s last polar bear and the Inuit woman who tries to save it. Dana Rodney’s The Last Polar Bear is a stirring, heartbreaking cry for change in the rapidly warming north. What The […]

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The Rooftop Garden, Menaka Raman-Wilms

Click here to return to the series The global novel exists, not as a genre separated from and opposed to other kinds of fiction, but as a perspective that governs the interpretation of experience. In this way, it is faithful to the way the global is actually lived–not through the […]

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Limberlost, Robbie Arnott

The third novel by the award-winning author of Flames and The Rain Heron, Limberlost is an extraordinary chronicle of life and land: of carnage and kindness, blood ties and love.

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Salt and Skin, Eliza Henry-Jones

Drawing on records of the witch trials and folk tales of the northern isles, Salt and Skin is full of tenderness, magic, and yearning. It’s a meditation on the absence of women’s voices and stories in history, and the unexpected ways that sites of long-ago trauma continue to haunt the living. […]

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Demon Copperhead, Barbara Kingsolver

A re-imagined Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield story, set in the Appalachian Mountains, this large book (over 600 pages) explores the life of a boy born in a poverty-stricken area to a single mother and looks at the opioid crisis in southern America. But, also, the beauty of the backwoods and […]

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In the Company of Men, Véronique Tadjo

Two boys go hunting in a forest, shooting down bats and cooking them over an open fire. Within a month, they are dead, bodies ravaged by an insidious disease that decimates their village and quickly spreads beyond. In a series of moving snapshots, Tadjo illustrates the terrible extent of the […]

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