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 […]
Read MoreCultural/Regional
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 […]
Read MoreSpotlight – Oghenechovwe Ekpeki, Zelda Knight, and Sheree Renée Thomas
Click here to return to the world eco-fiction series About the Book From award-winning editorial team Sheree Renée Thomas, Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki, and Zelda Knight comes an anthology of 32 original stories showcasing the breadth of fantasy and science fiction from Africa and the African diaspora: Africa Risen: A New […]
Read MoreThe 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 […]
Read MoreThe Rooftop Garden, Menaka Raman-Wilms
Click here to return to the series This month we head to Germany, for the first time in the world eco-fiction series, to explore The Rooftop Garden (Nightwood Editions, October 2022), a debut novel from Menaka Raman-Wilms’—author, journalist, and host of The Globe and Mail’s The Decibel. Thanks to Menaka […]
Read MoreLimberlost, 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.
Read MoreSalt 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. […]
Read MoreDemon 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 […]
Read MoreIn 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 […]
Read MoreThe Last Quarter of the Moon, Zijian Chi
Translated by Bruce Humes, this novel, first published in 2005, is being re-released by Penguin Random House, re-categorized in the genre of eco-fiction. In The Last Quarter of the Moon, prize-winning novelist Chi Zijian, creates a dazzling epic about an extraordinary woman bearing witness not just to the stories of […]
Read MoreAll the Horses of Iceland, Sarah Tolmie
Everyone knows of the horses of Iceland, wild, and small, and free, but few have heard their story. All the Horses of Iceland tells the tale of a Norse trader, his travels through Central Asia, and the ghostly magic that followed him home to the land of fire, stone, and […]
Read MoreValli, Sheela Tomy
Originally published in Malayalam, in June 2021, Valli is Sheela Tomy’s debut novel. It’s being translated into English by Jayasree Kalathil. According to Financial Express, it’s about the hill district of Kerala nestled in the Western Ghats, which faces an environmental catastrophe. HarperCollins states: Spanning the time between the 1970s […]
Read MoreScattered All Over the Earth, Yoko Tawada
Welcome to the not-too-distant future: Japan, having vanished from the face of the earth, is now remembered as “the land of sushi.” Hiruko, its former citizen and a climate refugee herself, has a job teaching immigrant children in Denmark with her invented language Panska (Pan-Scandinavian): “homemade language. no country to […]
Read MoreGrey Bees, Andrey Kurkov
Little Starhorodivka, a village of three streets, lies in Ukraine’s Grey Zone, the no-man’s-land between loyalist and separatist forces. Thanks to the lukewarm war of sporadic violence and constant propaganda that has been dragging on for years, only two residents remain: retired safety inspector turned beekeeper Sergey Sergeyich and Pashka, […]
Read MoreAfter the Dragons, Cynthia Zhang
Click here to return to the series About the Book This month we head to Beijing, China, as we talk with Cynthia Zhang about her newest novel, After the Dragons (Stelliform Press, 2021). Dragons were fire and terror to the Western world, but in the East they brought life-giving rain…Now, […]
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