Historical

The Hungry Tide, Amitav Ghosh

The Hungry Tide was published in 2004 but is still getting accolades in the media and has celebrated many reprints since. The Hungry Tide is a very contemporary story of adventure and unlikely love, identity and history, set in one of the most fascinating regions on the earth. Off the easternmost […]

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Jodi Lynn Anderson’s Midnight at the Electric, Review by Kimberly Christensen

Midnight at the Electric by Jodi Lynn Anderson Hardcover, 259 pages Published June 13, 2017 by HarperCollins Reviewed by Kimberly Christensen Midnight at the Electric interweaves three different generations of protagonists to tell the heartbreaking and simultaneously hopeful stories of young women living through times of societal upheaval. The stories […]

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The Wild Birds, Emily Strelow

Emily Strelow’s mesmerizing debut stitches together a sprawling saga of the feral Northwest across farmlands and deserts and generations: an American mosaic alive with birdsong and gunsmoke, held together by a silver box of eggshells—a long-ago gift from a mother to her daughter. Written with grace, grit, and an acute […]

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Mother of Rain, Karen Spears Zacharias

Using the idiom of the time and place–a small, close-knit, East Tennessee community as the Depression yields to World War II–the story follows the struggles of Maizee Hurd as she suffers through a series of setbacks from childhood on: the gruesome early death of her mother; her father’s rejection; the […]

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Cave Walker, Donelle Dreese

My hope is that Cave Walker fits into contemporary eco-fiction in the sense that nature occupies a central space in the novel almost at all times. The Maine woods through which Gillian hikes to reach the holy cave is a character. Each cave is a distinct character. Even when Gillian […]

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All Among the Barley, Melissa Harrison

All Among the Barley works best in its intensely-researched descriptions of farming: although prone to words like “Cerulean”, “soughing” and “susurrate”, they bring to poetic life the hard-won knowledge needed to determine when a crop is ripe. The drama of harvest is gripping: temperamental barley can be ruined by a […]

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Winternight Trilogy, Katherine Arden

This looks fantastic! A fairytale/fantasy where surrounding nature strongly intersects with the story. A magical debut novel for readers of Naomi Novik’s Uprooted, Erin Morgenstern’s The Night Circus, and Neil Gaiman’s myth-rich fantasies, The Bear and the Nightingale spins an irresistible spell as it announces the arrival of a singular […]

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On a River’s Bank, A Madhavan

Unfortunately I cannot find this book at Goodreads yet, but the Hindu Business Line has an interesting article with the title: Unquiet Flows a River: The English translation of a famed 1974 Tamil novel lets a broader audience take in the ethos of a subaltern people in a fecund Dravidian […]

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Where the Crawdads Sing, Delia Owens

Perfect for fans of Barbara Kingsolver and Karen Russell, Where the Crawdads Sing is at once an exquisite ode to the natural world, a heartbreaking coming-of-age story, and a surprising tale of possible murder. Owens reminds us that we are forever shaped by the children we once were, and that […]

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Shadow Country Trilogy, Peter Matthiessen

Inspired by a near-mythic event of the wild Florida frontier at the turn of the twentieth century, Shadow Country reimagines the legend of the inspired Everglades sugar planter and notorious outlaw E. J. Watson, who drives himself relentlessly toward his own violent end at the hands of neighbors who mostly […]

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The Woolsack Family Series, Kent Wascom

Click here for information on the series. The New Inheritors is the most recent (#3) book. Kent Wascom is one of the most exciting and ambitious emerging voices in American fiction. Envisaging a quartet of books telling the story of America through a single family and region, the Gulf Coast […]

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The Story Collector, Evie Gaughan

See our world eco-fiction spotlight on this title at Dragonfly. The Story Collector treads the intriguing line between the everyday and the otherworldly, the seen and the unseen. With a taste for the magical in everyday life, Evie Gaughan’s latest novel is full of ordinary characters with extraordinary tales to […]

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Peculiar Savage Beauty, Jessica McCann

American meteorologists rated the Dust Bowl the number one weather event of the twentieth century. And as they go over the scars of the land, historians say it was the nation’s worst prolonged environmental disaster. -Timothy Egan, The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great […]

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Unsheltered, Barbara Kingsolver

On February 5, the Herald Live (link no longer valid) announced Kingsolver’s newest novel. According to the announcement: The new novel is set in two different eras, first in the modern-day US, in a fictional town called Vineland where Willa Knox stands braced against the vicissitudes of her shattered life […]

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Clovis, Jack Clinton

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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