Cultural/Regional

The 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 More

The 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 More

Drive 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 More

Disappearing 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 More

Wolfe 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 More

Three 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 More

Greenwood, 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 […]

Read More

The Hollow Middle, John Popielaski

Author: © John Popielaski Type: Fiction Novel Publisher/Ordering: Unsolicited Press Publication Date: December 4, 2018 Author Links: Author website Back to the Dragonfly Library Book Description: The primary narrative thread, Albert seeking a more authentic off-the-grid life in Maine, attempts to subvert that archetypal storyline of someone fleeing to the woods to escape […]

Read More

No Entry, Gila Green

Click here to return to the series In September, we look at another YA fiction novel–and yet another novel set in South Africa. Thanks to Stormbird Press and author Gila Green for the interview and essay. Stormbird Press, one of our affiliates, is a new publisher in Australia. As an […]

Read More

The Black Dwarves of the Good Little Bay, Varun Thomas Mathew

The sea has invaded its boundaries, and its inhabitants reside in a towering structure called the Bombadrome, which hovers above the barren land. Theirs is an artificially equated society; they lead technologically directed lives; they have no memory of the past. They don’t remember that this place was once called […]

Read More

Memory Police, Yōko Ogawa

The book is practically a novelization of German pastor Martin Niemoller’s post-World War II poem “First they came …,” but the environmental effects of the disappearances of things like roses and fruit make Ogawa’s prose feel applicable not just to political atrocities like genocide but to climate change or any […]

Read More

The Gulf, Belle Boggs

With sharp humor and deep empathy, The Gulf is a memorable debut novel in which Belle Boggs plumbs the troubled waters dividing America. -Goodreads Goodreads Reviews Back to GoodReads

Read More

Where the River Runs Gold, Sita Brahmachari

Click here to return to the series This month we look at Sita Brahmachari’s novel Where the River Runs Gold (Waterstones, July 2019), which takes place in an everyland, according to the author. But she told me that Meteore mountain–meaning between earth and sky–was inspired by Meteora in Greece and […]

Read More

Dark Constellations, Pola Oloixarac

Argentinian Pola Oloixarac’s novel investigates humanity’s quest for knowledge and control, hurtling from the 19th century mania for scientific classification to present-day mass surveillance and the next steps in human evolution. Goodreads Reviews Back to GoodReads

Read More

Latitudes of Longing, Shubhangi Swarup

A recent take on the state of writing argues that novelists have been complicit in maintaining silence around global warming and climate change…They have obsessed over everyday life, but overlooked larger units of time and place. In the aftermath of such a critique of the genre of the novel, Shubhangi […]

Read More