Written with down-to-earth lucidity and ethereal breeziness, this is an unforgettable debut about coming of age in a world that seems increasingly hostile. Watts explores feminine fear, apathy and danger, building to a tightly controlled bushfire of ecological and personal crisis. Goodreads Reviews Back to GoodReads
Read MoreCultural/Regional
The World on Either Side, Diane Terrana
Reviewed by Kimberly Christensen Young Adult Fiction Content Warning: This book includes descriptions of death, depression, attempted suicide, animal poaching, animal cruelty, forced migration, human trafficking, war, genocide, child soldiers, and rape. Following the death of her boyfriend, high school senior Valentine falls into a severe depression and nearly overdoses […]
Read MoreThe Last Wave, Pankaj Sekhsaria
Ever the aimless drifter, Harish finds the anchor his life needs in a chance encounter with members of the ancient and threatened – Jarawa community-the ‘original people’ of the Andaman Islands and its tropical rain forests. As he observes the slow but sure destruction of everything the Jarawa require for […]
Read MoreStrange Birds, Celia C. Pérez
Selected as one of our January features for Turning the Tide: The Youngest Generation, Strange Birds: a field guide to ruffling feathers is Florida-based juvenile fiction. Abstract: After Ofelia, Aster, Cat, and Lane fail to persuade a local girls club to change an outdated tradition, they form an alternative group […]
Read MoreSplit Tooth, Tanya Taqaq
This book is being read and discussed at the Cambridge Ecofiction Bookclub in January 2020. According to Goodreads, Veering back and forth between the grittiest features of a small arctic town, the electrifying proximity of the world of animals, and ravishing world of myth, Tanya Tagaq explores a world where […]
Read MoreSool, Cho Dharman
According to Times India, Tamil writer Cho Dharman won the Sahitya Akademi Award in 2019. The novel is a “burning portrait of the environmental and ecological disaster in Tamil Nadu.” The story takes place in Urulaikkudi, the native village of Mr. Dharman, and he has captured the destruction of the […]
Read MoreAn Invite to Eternity, Gary Budden and Marian Womack, et al.
Humanity is facing a challenge if a magnitude ever before seen, compromising new anxieties we are at times unable to process. An Invite to Eternity is a collection of short story fiction that addresses this shift under the premise that speculative fiction, weird fiction, and dark horror are in a […]
Read MoreMountains Piled Upon Mountains, Edited by Jessica Cory
Click here to return to the series In November, we head to the USA, the first of the world eco-fiction travels to do so. Having spent a great amount of time in the Appalachian Mountains as a child (you can read more here), when I came across the anthology Mountains […]
Read MoreThe Hills Reply, Tarjei Vesaas
Translated by Elizabeth Rokkan Tarjei Vesaas’s final work before his death, this episodic novel drifts between dream-like abstraction and vivid description of seemingly ordinary yet heightened scenes of the Norwegian countryside. Goodreads Reviews Back to GoodReads
Read MoreThe Dark Star Trilogy, Marlon James
The first volume of a promised trilogy, a fabulist reimagining of Africa, with inevitable echoes of Tolkien, George R.R. Martin and Black Panther, but highly original, its language surging with power, its imagination all-encompassing. . . . Marlon is a writer who must be read. –Salman Rushdie, TIME on Part […]
Read MoreDrive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, Olga Tokarczuk
Translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones (originally titled Prowadź swój pług przez kości umarłych). Man Booker International Prize Nominee (2019). Olga is also a Nobel prize winner in literature as well as the Nike in Poland. This tale of an elderly female eccentric investigating the murders of humans and animals in a remote forest […]
Read MoreDisappearing Earth, Julia Phillips
It’s possible, though, that novelists are responding to the effects of climate change in ways other than direct representation…Julia Phillips’s brilliant debut novel “Disappearing Earth” is what Jane Allison calls a “radial” narrative — one where some inciting incident creates ripples that move outward and often compound in complexity rather […]
Read MoreWolfe Island, Lucy Treloar
Part western, part lament for a disappearing world, Wolfe Island (set off the northeast coast of the US) is a transporting novel that explores connection and isolation and the ways lives and families shatter and are remade. Goodreads Reviews Back to GoodReads
Read MoreThree Ways to Disappear, Katy Yocom
Click here to return to the series In October we head back to India, this time with author Katy Yocom, author of Three Ways to Disappear. Ecofiction is a type of literature that handles nature-oriented and human-impact plots while telling a great fictional story that imagines or reflects real environmental […]
Read MoreGreenwood, Michael Christie
In an era of so much uncertainty, it is comforting to see novelists begin to work through the biggest issue of our age. And, in this case, convert our collective suffering into brilliant, beauty-filled art. There is a kind of hope in that. With any luck, “Greenwood” will spur readers to […]
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