“A girl comes of age against the knife.” So begins the story of Betty Carpenter. Born in a bathtub in 1954 to a Cherokee father and white mother, Betty is the sixth of eight siblings. The world they inhabit is one of poverty and violence–both from outside the family, and […]
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Crooked Hallelujah tells the stories of Justine–a mixed-blood Cherokee woman– and her daughter, Reney, as they move from Eastern Oklahoma’s Indian Country in the hopes of starting a new, more stable life in Texas amid the oil bust of the 1980s. However, life in Texas isn’t easy, and Reney feels […]
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From the world of Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls comes the historical novel based on the life of Dr. Wangari Maathai, the Nobel Peace Prize-winning activist from Kenya. Wangari lives in a magical place in rural Kenya where the soil is rich for planting, the trees abundant, and the […]
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Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People looks at the Bhopal gas explosion in India – one of the most horrific environmental disasters of the 20th-century. A poisonous gas leak from a US-owned pesticide plant killed several thousand people and injured more than half a million. –The Independent Goodreads Reviews Back to Goodreads
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Complete title: Heart Wood — Four Women, for the Earth, for the Future Heart Wood is a compelling family saga set in the foothills of California’s Sierra Nevada. Its characters shift from one generation to the next, as do the struggles they face in saving their homestead from the ravages […]
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It’s difficult to highlight the eco-horror in this one without spoiling the twist, but suffice it to say, the Doyles have a hefty supernatural secret. In Mexican Gothic, the horror isn’t in nature turning against people but is in the way that extraction of natural resources helps entrench colonial powers […]
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Profoundly moving and exquisitely written, Tara June Winch’s The Yield is the story of a people and a culture dispossessed. But it is as much a celebration of what was and what endures, and a powerful reclaiming of Indigenous language, storytelling and identity. Goodreads Reviews Back to GoodReads
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Layered with fascinating historical detail, this is a novel that breathes deeply of the sun-dappled forest and bears witness to the stump-ridden fields the loggers, and the first waves of modernity, leave behind. At its heart, Deep River is an extraordinarily ambitious exploration of the place of the individual, and […]
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Paul Kingsnorth’s Buckmaster trilogy, a much looser series, also draws to a close this year. It began in 2014 with The Wake, an extraordinary book written in a mongrel form of Old English and set in the aftermath of the Norman invasion; the final volume, Alexandria (Faber, May), fast-forwards to “the far side […]
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Through litanies of the names of overlooked poets and science fiction writers of color, through multiple survival stories from New Orleanians in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, through deep and heartbreaking asides about Argentinian and Bolshevik revolutionaries, Zapata shows that the multiverses we crave are contained within each person, each […]
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We originally posted The History of Bees in June 2017 and then updated this post in December 2019 with the second two books in the Klimakvartetten series. In the spirit of Station Eleven and Never Let Me Go, this dazzling and ambitious literary debut follows three generations of beekeepers from […]
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It’s within this strange and ambiguous historical setting that Harris has also fashioned a cautionary tale for today — a tale over which the 21st century perils of climate change and unfettered technology cast an unsettling shadow. –OCanada.com All civilisations think they are invulnerable. History warns us none is. 1468. […]
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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
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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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On the banks of the Zambezi River, a few miles from the majestic Victoria Falls, there was once a colonial settlement called The Old Drift. Here begins the story of a small African nation, told by a swarm-like chorus that calls itself man’s greatest nemesis. Goodreads Reviews Back to GoodReads
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