Clinton’s novel is an artful literary response to the unutterable and largely ignored decline of our collective natural wealth. Clinton mixes a sardonic misanthropy of our own current environmental course with jubilation, and the joy of love, the celebration of the human condition, and the intense passion of being immersed […]
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The Great Alone, Kristin Hannah
Like a curved, upturned palm, Alaska beckons with her beauty, her majesty, and her prolific grandeur…The awe-inspiring allure gestures first until the ruggedness of her backbone sets in. -Goodreads Goodreads Review Back to GoodReads
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Happiness, Aminatta Forna
In this delicate yet powerful novel of loves lost and new, of past griefs and of the hidden side of a multicultural metropolis, Aminatta Forna asks us to consider the values of the society we live in, our co-existence with one another and all living creatures – and the true […]
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Tarry this Night, Kristyn Dunnion
This vividly imagined dystopian novel, set in the near future, unfolds over the course of a few days. –The Star In this unsettling modern Lilith tale, spirited women resist their violent, racist culture and, in so doing, become outlaws. Goodreads Review Back to GoodReads
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Ice, Anna Kavan
Anna Kavan’s novel “Ice,” a fantasia about predatory male sexual behavior that takes place during an apocalyptic climate catastrophe, was first published fifty years ago. (An anniversary edition has just been released by Penguin Classics.) It was the last novel that Kavan published before she died in 1968—there have since […]
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Weatherfronts, Sarah Butler et al.
As Peter Gingold, Director, Tipping Point, says: “This most grandiose and abstract subject is experienced at a very personal level, making its demands on the way we live with partners – or with friends, neighbours and communities. This must be fruitful.” The pieces in this collection were commissioned by TippingPoint, […]
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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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Who Fears Death, Nnedi Okorafor
Her stories, which are often set in West Africa, use the framework of fantasy to explore weighty social issues: racial and gender inequality, political violence, the destruction of the environment, genocide and corruption…Her novel, “Who Fears Death,” which is set in a postapocalyptic Africa, has been optioned as a series […]
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Future Home of the Living God, Louise Erdrich
The idea that evolution could suddenly move backward may seem like an incredible fantasy, but in this dreamlike, suspenseful novel, it’s a fitting analogue for the environmental degradation we already experience. Kirkus Reviews A chilling dystopian novel both provocative and prescient, Future Home of the Living God is a startlingly […]
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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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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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The Marrow Thieves, Cherie Dimaline
In the latest YA novel by Métis writer and editor Cherie Dimaline, the world has been ravaged by global warming. Cities have crumbled from the coastlines, “breaking off like crust,” and hurricanes, earthquakes, and tsunamis have wiped out entire communities. Millions of people have lost their lives, and those who […]
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When Rain Clouds Gather, Bessie Head
When Rain Clouds Gather & Maru are two books in one. The poverty-stricken village of Golema Mmidi, in the heart of rural Botswana, offers a haven to the exiles gathered there. Makhaya, a political refugee from South Africa, becomes involved with an English agricultural expert and the villagers as they […]
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Closing Down, Sally Abbott
Speculative fiction usually starts with a “what if”: what if there was an environmental reckoning? What if we didn’t have enough water? What if the world was running out of food? What if that was coupled with a catastrophic global financial crisis? What would Australia look like? And how would […]
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