Books

The River, Peter Heller

The real delight is the nature writing. The River is a fiction addition to the New Landscape writing of Robert Macfarlane and Rebecca Solnit, prose so vivid and engaging that a city-dwelling reviewer can feel the clammy cold of a fog over a river or the heat of subterranean tree roots […]

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The Blind Earthworm in the Labyrinth, Veeraporn Nitiprapha

The Blind Earthworm in the Labyrinth, which won the South East Asian Writers Award for the original Thai edition, is also lush with characters — and foliage and fauna. In Veeraporn’s telling, the Thai capital doesn’t unfold, as in Pitchaya’s plaited tale, but explode. –The New York Times Goodreads Reviews […]

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Bangkok Wakes to Rain, Pitchaya Sudbanthad

Recreates the experience of living in Thailand’s aqueous climate so viscerally that you can feel the water rising around your ankles. -Ron Charles, Washington Post Goodreads Reviews Back to Goodreads

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To Follow Elephants, Rick Hodges

Click here to return to the series In today’s world series, we travel back to the continent of Africa, this time with author Rick Hodges; we talk about his visits to Kenya and his new novel To Follow Elephants (Stormbird Press, March 2019). Stick around, because this summer we will […]

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Oil on Water, Helon Habila

Habila’s spare but vivid prose takes the reader from the tenements of the working poor to the mansions of oil executives, from the camps of armed militants to peaceful, quasi-monastic communities devoted to the worship of nature gods. But as diverse as Nigeria is, the entire country has one common, […]

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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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We Can Save Us All, Adam Nemett

Welcome to The Egg, an off-campus geodesic dome where David Fuffman and his crew of alienated Princeton students train for what might be the end of days: America is in a perpetual state of war, climate disasters create a global state of emergency, and scientists believe time itself may be […]

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The Migration, Helen Marshall

Marshall is painting on a large canvas here and her style is unabashedly baroque: the novel is characterized by a high level of drama, intensity, and movement, including a repeated motif of flooding, raging waters that claim (or threaten to claim) various characters over the course of the narrative. Climate change […]

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Last Ones Left Alive, Sarah Davis-Goff

In Last Ones Left Alive (Tinder Press) the Irish writer Sarah Davis-Goff, co-founder of the fine independent publisher Tramp Press, imagines a post-apocalyptic Ireland stalked by a zombie-like menace, the skrake. –New Statesman LAST ONES LEFT ALIVE is the story of Orpen, a young woman who must walk on foot across […]

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Doggerland, Ben Smith

Debut novelist Ben Smith enters the scene with Doggerland (Fourth Estate), a haunting story set on a huge wind farm in some unspecified time after climate disaster has rendered most of what was once the landscape uninhabitable and survivors are in thrall to an organisation known only as the Company. –New Statesman […]

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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 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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