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The Novels of Deon Meyer, South Africa

Click here to return to the series Today the global eco-fiction series travels to South Africa to explore the beautiful country and environmental themes found within Deon Meyer’s crime novels (Meyer writes in his native Afrikaans, and his books have been translated around the world), noting, for example, the Lemmer […]

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Spliced Series, Jon McGoran

In this gripping sci-fi thriller, genetically altered teens fight for survival in a near-future society that is redefining what it means to be human. Goodreads Reviews Back to Goodreads [Coming May 2019] In the second installment of the Spliced series, sixteen-year-old Jimi Corcoran risks her life to clear a friend’s […]

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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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Jaws of Life, Laura Leigh Morris

In the hills of north central West Virginia, there lives a cast of characters who face all manner of problems. From the people who are incarcerated in West Virginia’s prisons, to a woman who is learning how to lose her sight with grace, to another who sorely regrets selling her […]

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Waste Tide, Chen Qiufan

Chen tells me he saw “a huge garbage field” in which migrant workers “are using their hands to break down the pieces of electronic devices, putting them on heat to melt the metals, or putting them in acid pools to dissemble the elements.” It is, he says, an environment of […]

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Remembrance of Earth’s Past Series, Liu Cixin

Chinese sci-fi has become a global phenomenon thanks to a trilogy by Liu Cixin, a former software engineer from Yangquan. The first novel, The Three-Body Problem, was published in China in 2008 and in English in 2014…In [the novel], the existential threat to humanity is something that will be visited upon […]

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The City in the Middle of the Night, Charlie Jane Anders

Anders, former editor of io9 and Hugo and Nebula Award-winner for 2017, writes a story of a divided future world in stasis. January is a colonized planet split into two halves, one always bright-hot and one always freezing dark. The two habitable human cities straddle the small zone of dusk […]

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Shrinking Sinking Land, Kell Cowley

One week before the Global Mandatory Hibernation and Flea Wheeler will do anything to avoid a long winter underground. A claustrophobic climate refugee who has been living rough on the flooded streets of Manchester, Flea dreads the day she’ll be forced into shelter so a geoengineering experiment can attempt to […]

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Treed

Author: © Virginia Arthur Publication Date: September 20, 2018 Ordering: Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Amazon Social Media: Author’s website, Goodreads Back to the Dragonfly Library Excerpts Wiping tears off her face, she returned to the hotel where an envelope from Millicent was waiting for her. Once in her room, she […]

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Alexandra Monir’s The Final Six, Review by Kimberly Christensen

The Final Six by Alexandra Monir Hardcover, 352 pages Published March 6, 2018 by HarperTeen Reviewed by Kimberly Christensen The Final Six is a young adult science fiction novel that leapfrogs the reader into a dystopian future in which space colonization is humanity’s best hope for survival. With megastorms, rising […]

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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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Where the Forest Meets the Stars, Glendy Vanderah

After the loss of her mother and her own battle with breast cancer, Joanna Teale returns to her graduate research on nesting birds in rural Illinois, determined to prove that her recent hardships have not broken her. She throws herself into her work from dusk to dawn, until her solitary […]

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Great American Desert: Stories, Terese Svoboda

Preorder at The Ohio State University Press Svoboda (Anything That Burns You: A Portrait of Lola Ridge, Radical Poet, 2016, etc.) returns to her art’s quintessential landscape to relate the overlapping epochs of the great American desert…A challenging author’s take on the most challenging of subjects—the survival of our species […]

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Tentacle, Rita Indiana

Rita Indiana’s Tentacle (originally published in Spanish as La mucama de Omicunlé) is a speculative text that has as much to say about the future as it does about the present. While the novel is set in the Dominican Republic in the year 2037, it is as much a commentary on the […]

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