Books

Indie Corner – Claire Datnow

Back to the Indie Corner series I’m delighted to present Claire Datnow as this month’s Indie Corner author. Claire was born and raised in Johannesburg, South Africa, which ignited her love for the natural world and diverse cultures. Claire taught creative writing to gifted and talented students in the Birmingham, […]

Read More

Daylight Come, Diana McCaulay

It is 2084. Climate change has made life on the Caribbean island of Bajacu a gruelling trial. The sun is so hot that people must sleep in the day and live and work at night. In a world of desperate scarcity, people who reach forty are expendable. Those who still […]

Read More

Cormorant Lake, Faith Merino

At once fantastical and deeply rooted in the natural world, Faith Merino’s deeply affecting and spirited debut novel explores the shape of family, the enduring bonds of friendship, and the imperfections of motherhood—messy and beautiful, instinctive and learned, temporal but permanently life-altering. Goodreads Reviews Back to Goodreads

Read More

Naturalizing Africa, Cajetan Iheka

Full title: Naturalizing Africa: Ecological Violence, Agency, and Postcolonial Resistance in African Literature Though non-fiction, this text covers novels and narratives written by Africans and, according to Yale News, the book: …highlights how literary texts call attention to human-caused environmental degradation on the continent, including the ways in which postcolonial […]

Read More

Infinite Country, Patricia Engel

Infinite Country is a multi generational family saga about a Colombian family with mixed citizenship status. The story is told through different family members perspectives, time periods, and Andean mythology. The heartache and hope interwoven into this fractured family due to the US’s atrocious immigration policies was so visceral. I […]

Read More

Good Neighbors, Sarah Langan

Climate change is wreaking havoc, adding its own sinister atmosphere to Maple Street, when a huge toxic sinkhole opens up in the neighborhood’s green space. –NWI Times Celeste Ng’s enthralling dissection of suburbia meets Shirley Jackson’s creeping dread in this propulsive literary noir, when a sudden tragedy exposes the depths […]

Read More

Spotlight – Tlotlo Tsamaase

Click here to return to the series Intro This month we travel to the world of Motswana author Tlotlo Tsamaase, whose short story “Eclipse Our Sins” rocked me in a good way. You can read the story at Clarkesworld. I featured this story in my last article at Medium, Part […]

Read More

Indie Corner – Ryan Mizzen

Back to the Indie Corner series February’s Indie Corner looks at the amazing Ryan Mizzen and his children’s fiction Hedgey-A and the Honey Bees! Mary: Tell us about yourself–your life so far and how you got started in writing. What else have you written or published? Ryan: My childhood was […]

Read More

Ducks, Newburyport by Lucy Ellmann

LATTICING one cherry pie after another, an Ohio housewife tries to bridge the gaps between reality and the torrent of meaningless info that is the United States of America. She worries about her children, her dead parents, African elephants, the bedroom rituals of “happy couples”, Weapons of Mass Destruction, and […]

Read More

The Living Sea of Waking Dreams, Richard Flanagan

In a world of perennial fire and growing extinctions, Anna’s aged mother is dying—if her three children would just allow it. Condemned by their pity to living she increasingly escapes through her hospital window into visions of horror and delight. When Anna’s finger vanishes and a few months later her […]

Read More

The Forever Sea, Joshua Phillip Johnson

The first book in a new environmental epic fantasy series set in a world where ships kept afloat by magical hearthfires sail an endless grass sea. Read more at Female First UK. Goodreads Reviews Back to GoodReads

Read More

Dreamtime, Venetia Welby

Venetia Welby’s exquisite and hallucinogenic Dreamtime (Quartet, April) is set in a near future in which we have lost the battle against climate change. –The Guardian To mend their broken past Sol and her lovelorn friend Kit must journey across poisoned oceans to the furthest reaches of the Japanese archipelago, […]

Read More

How Beautiful We Were, Imbolo Mbue

“We should have known the end was near.” So begins Imbolo Mbue’s powerful second novel, How Beautiful We Were. Set in the fictional African village of Kosawa, it tells the story of a people living in fear amidst environmental degradation wrought by an American oil company. Goodreads Reviews Back to […]

Read More

Red Island House, Andrea Lee

A sweeping novel about marriage and loyalty, identity and heritage, fate and freedom, Red Island House reintroduces readers to a powerhouse literary voice and an extravagantly lush, enchanted world. Goodreads Reviews Back to GoodReads

Read More

Rabbit Island, Elvira Navarro

Combining the gritty surrealism of David Lynch with the explosive interior meditations of Clarice Lispector, the stories in Elvira Navarro’s Rabbit Island traverse the fickle, often terrifying terrain between madness and freedom. In the title story, a so-called “non-inventor” conducts an experiment on an island inhabited exclusively by birds and […]

Read More