Literary

Undergrowth, Nancy Burke

In this luminous novel, the all-too-human experiences of fear, love and loss become amplified with potentially disastrous consequences. In 1960s Brazil, an indigenous group is on the brink of a tragedy, the dimensions of which they are only beginning to grasp. A small band of disaffected government agents, academics and […]

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Magdalena Mountain, Michael Pyle

“Magdalena Mountain” is a novel, a work of fiction, but it contains a good deal of nonfiction, in the sense of the traditional nature writing that people know from my books in the past. That is, one of the main characters is a butterfly, a real butterfly, called the Magdalena […]

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Elmet, Fiona Mozley

Fresh and distinctive writing from an exciting new voice in fiction, Elmet is an unforgettable novel about family, as well as a beautiful meditation on landscape. [Winner of the Man Booker Prize, 2017] Goodreads Reviews Back to GoodReads

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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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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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Lost Objects, Marian Womack

These stories explore place and landscape at different stages of decay, positioning them as fighting grounds for death and renewal. From dystopian Andalusia to Scotland or the Norfolk countryside, they bring together monstrous insects, ghostly lovers, soon-to-be extinct species, unexpected birds, and interstellar explorers, to form a coherent narrative about […]

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Florida, Lauren Groff

That Groff is pursuing a psychogeography of Florida, exploring both a state in the union and a state of mind, is made clear by her insistent figuring of the subconscious. The book is approximately thirty per cent underwater, and it is full of descents. –The New Yorker The New York […]

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All Rivers Run Free, Natasha Carthew

Thanks so much to the publisher for sending me a galley and press about this upcoming novel. All Rivers Run Free is a lyrical novel about marginalisation, mental illness and motherhood set on the ravaged, near-future coast of Cornwall. It’s a world collapsing under flooding and social breakdown, with military […]

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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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Happiness, Aminatta Forna

In this delicate yet powerful novel of loves lost and new, of past griefs and of the hidden side of a multicultural metropolis, Aminatta Forna asks us to consider the values of the society we live in, our co-existence with one another and all living creatures – and the true […]

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