A book, television show, or movie set somewhere in Scandinavia leads the reader or viewer to expect dark, foreboding landscapes and ominous, threatening events. Susanne Jansson’s sparkling debut novel The Forbidden Place fulfills these expectations in a myriad of absorbing ways. –Run Spot Run In the remote Swedish wetlands lies […]
Read More
Saving Wonder by Mary Knight Hardcover, 288 pages Published February 23rd, 2016, by Scholastic Review by Kimberly Christensen Curley Hines and his grandpa love their mountains and their way of life, even though mining accidents that happened on the mountains claimed the lives of their family members. Still, most everyone […]
Read More
The Blind Earthworm in the Labyrinth, which won the South East Asian Writers Award for the original Thai edition, is also lush with characters — and foliage and fauna. In Veeraporn’s telling, the Thai capital doesn’t unfold, as in Pitchaya’s plaited tale, but explode. –The New York Times Goodreads Reviews […]
Read More
Recreates the experience of living in Thailand’s aqueous climate so viscerally that you can feel the water rising around your ankles. -Ron Charles, Washington Post Goodreads Reviews Back to Goodreads
Read More
Click here to return to the series In today’s world series, we travel back to the continent of Africa, this time with author Rick Hodges; we talk about his visits to Kenya and his new novel To Follow Elephants (Stormbird Press, March 2019). Stick around, because this summer we will […]
Read More
Habila’s spare but vivid prose takes the reader from the tenements of the working poor to the mansions of oil executives, from the camps of armed militants to peaceful, quasi-monastic communities devoted to the worship of nature gods. But as diverse as Nigeria is, the entire country has one common, […]
Read More
The Hungry Tide was published in 2004 but is still getting accolades in the media and has celebrated many reprints since. The Hungry Tide is a very contemporary story of adventure and unlikely love, identity and history, set in one of the most fascinating regions on the earth. Off the easternmost […]
Read More
In Last Ones Left Alive (Tinder Press) the Irish writer Sarah Davis-Goff, co-founder of the fine independent publisher Tramp Press, imagines a post-apocalyptic Ireland stalked by a zombie-like menace, the skrake. –New Statesman LAST ONES LEFT ALIVE is the story of Orpen, a young woman who must walk on foot across […]
Read More
Click here to return to the series Today the global eco-fiction series travels to South Africa to explore the beautiful country and environmental themes found within Deon Meyer’s crime novels (Meyer writes in his native Afrikaans, and his books have been translated around the world), noting, for example, the Lemmer […]
Read More
Using the idiom of the time and place–a small, close-knit, East Tennessee community as the Depression yields to World War II–the story follows the struggles of Maizee Hurd as she suffers through a series of setbacks from childhood on: the gruesome early death of her mother; her father’s rejection; the […]
Read More
In the hills of north central West Virginia, there lives a cast of characters who face all manner of problems. From the people who are incarcerated in West Virginia’s prisons, to a woman who is learning how to lose her sight with grace, to another who sorely regrets selling her […]
Read More
Chen tells me he saw “a huge garbage field” in which migrant workers “are using their hands to break down the pieces of electronic devices, putting them on heat to melt the metals, or putting them in acid pools to dissemble the elements.” It is, he says, an environment of […]
Read More
Rita Indiana’s Tentacle (originally published in Spanish as La mucama de Omicunlé) is a speculative text that has as much to say about the future as it does about the present. While the novel is set in the Dominican Republic in the year 2037, it is as much a commentary on the […]
Read More
See our global eco-fiction spotlight on Jennifer Dance’s White Feather collection at Dragonfly.eco. Hawk, a First Nations teen from northern Alberta, is a cross-country runner who aims to win gold in an upcoming competition between all the schools in Fort McMurray. But when Hawk discovers he has leukemia, his identity […]
Read More
In this luminous novel, the all-too-human experiences of fear, love and loss become amplified with potentially disastrous consequences. In 1960s Brazil, an indigenous group is on the brink of a tragedy, the dimensions of which they are only beginning to grasp. A small band of disaffected government agents, academics and […]
Read More