Historical

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On February 5, the Herald Live (link no longer valid) announced Kingsolver’s newest novel.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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The Devil’s Highway, Gregory Norminton

An ancient route links Britain’s deep past and far future in an ecologically aware tale spanning thousands of years –The Guardian Spanning centuries, and combining elements of historical and speculative fiction with the narrative drive of pure thriller, this is a breathtakingly original novel that challenges our dearly held assumptions […]

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The Overstory, Richard Powers

A hearing-and speech-impaired scientist discovers that trees are communicating with one another. These and five other strangers, each summoned in different ways by trees, are brought together in a last and violent stand to save the continent’s few remaining acres of virgin forest. There is a world alongside ours—vast, slow, […]

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Parts Per Million, Julia Stoops

Parts per Million, the debut novel by Julia Stoops, is forthcoming April 2018. The manuscript was a finalist for the PEN/Bellwether Prize. Three activists let a photographer with a hazy past join their unorthodox household in Julia Stoops’s debut novel, a finalist for the PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction. As […]

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The Sunken Cathedral, Kate Walbert

From the National Book Award nominee and author of the acclaimed, New York Times bestselling A Short History of Women, a deeply moving, “lyrical, ominous, and unexpectedly funny” (Tom Perrotta, author of The Leftovers) novel that follows a cast of characters as they negotiate one of Manhattan’s swiftly changing neighborhoods, […]

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Addlands, Tom Bullough

There have been a number of attempts to graft the style of the so-called new nature writing onto the novel…Tom Bullough’s Addlands is a very creditable contribution to this genre. -The Spectator The stark beauty of the Welsh countryside is given powerful life in this sweeping tale of one family […]

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Only the Animals, Ceridwen Dovey

Ten tales are told by the souls of animals killed in human conflicts in the past century or so, from a camel in colonial Australia to a cat in the trenches in World War I, from a bear starved to death during the siege of Sarajevo to a mussel that […]

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Cities of Salt, Abdul Rahman Munif

Translated by Peter Theroux. Set in an unnamed Persian Gulf kingdom in the 1930s, this remarkable novel tells the story of the disruption and diaspora of a poor oasis community following the discovery of oil there. The meeting of the Arabs and the Americans who, in essence, colonize the remote […]

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A Thin Bright Line, Lucy Jane Bledsoe

One day a few years ago I was telling a friend about my aunt and she suggested I Google her. Since Lucybelle died in 1966 and was just a farm girl from Arkansas, I didn’t expect to find anything. But I did: two items popped up on the internet. One was […]

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Strange as this Weather Has Been, Ann Pancake

Set in present day West Virginia, Ann Pancake’s debut novel, Strange As This Weather Has Been, tells the story of a coal mining family— a couple and their four children— living through the latest mining boom and dealing with the mountaintop removal and strip mining that is ruining what is […]

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The Spawning Grounds, Gail Anderson-Dargatz

Sharp imagery and spare dialogue are put to good use in Gail Anderson-Dargatz’s ghost tale of a mysterious force intent on destroying a family in rural British Columbia. The Globe and Mail The long-awaited new novel by the two-time Giller-shortlisted author is full of the qualities Gail Anderson-Dargatz’s fans love: […]

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Jesus and Magdalene, João Cerqueira

Thanks to João Cerqueira for information about his novel Jesus and Magdalene, published by Line by Lion Publications in July 2016. It is available for order at Amazon. The novel won the silver medal at the 2015 Latino Book Awards with the original title A segunda vinda de Cristo à […]

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