Blaze Island, Catherine Bush

Climate change is both an external and internal phenomenon in Catherine Bush’s brilliant new novel, Blaze Island. Set on an island off the coast of Newfoundland, its cast of characters includes a renegade climate scientist and his young daughter Miranda. They are self-made castaways who can’t get far enough away […]

Read More

The Heartless Series, Sarah Lahey

What will the world look like in thirty years’ time? How will humanity survive the oncoming effects of climate change? Set in the near future and inspired by the world around us, Gravity Is Heartless is a romantic adventure that imagines a world on the cusp of climate catastrophe. #1: […]

Read More

Seasonal Series, Ali Smith

Echoing Keats’s famous ode, the book is punctuated by placid country scenes of grain being harvested, birds flying south, days growing shorter and nights longer and colder. So familiar is this picture of autumnal transformation that readers are easily lulled into a false sense of comfort. But it slowly becomes […]

Read More

Limbo: A Novel about Jamaica, Esther Figueroa

Flora Smith, Jamaican scientist and head of tiny NGO Environment Now, dedicates her life to getting Jamaicans to care about the natural environment. At the opening of Limbo, Flora is confronted by the nagging reality of not having enough money to keep her organization afloat. When sand is stolen from […]

Read More

Waste Tide, Chen Qiufan

Click here to return to the series In June, we travel to a fictional place in China called Silicon Isle, based on the real town of Guiyu, in the Chaoyang district of Guangdong province. Author Chen Qiufan takes us there with his novel Waste Tide. I am grateful to Chen […]

Read More

Six Spellmakers of Dorabji Street, Shabnam Minwalla

With Nivi Mallik’s arrival at Cosy Castle, the rules start to change. The bimbli trees become the hang-out spot for two giggly girls and the driveway is a permanent cricket pitch for the boys. But the happy times are soon ended by the ‘dragon’ and the ‘crone’, who gang up […]

Read More

Environmental Fiction Survey

I invite you to check out this survey that gauges interest, social impacts, and trends of eco-fiction readers. Please participate and share with friends, family, students, and colleagues who love to read books! The survey is here if you have a Google account and here if you do not have […]

Read More

Interview with Lovis Geier

Women Working in Nature and the Arts I  recently had the chance to discover a new voice in the field of ecofiction: Lovis Geier’s, who runs the YouTube channel Ecofictology. Lovis is perfect for bringing the field of ecological fiction to a visual perspective, for she is knowledgeable, witty, and […]

Read More

Not a Drop to Drink Review

Not a Drop to Drink by Mindy McGinnis Young Adult Fiction Reviewed by Kimberly Christensen From the very first line, Mindy McGinnis sucks the reader into an apocalyptic world in which water–and its scarcity–determines every move made by sixteen-year-old Lynn and her mother Lauren, two women surviving in what’s left […]

Read More

Potiki, Patricia Grace

‘Destroy the land and sea, we destroy ourselves.’ On the remote coast of New Zealand, at the curve that binds land and sea, a small Maori community live, work, fish, play and tell stories of their ancestors. This novel was republished in February 2020 by Penguin Classics and was featured […]

Read More

The Unpassing, Chia-Chia Lin

With flowing prose that evokes the terrifying beauty of the Alaskan wilderness, Lin explores the fallout after the loss of a child and the way in which a family is forced to grieve in a place that doesn’t yet feel like home. Emotionally raw and subtly suspenseful, The Unpassing is […]

Read More

Sharks in the Time of Saviours, Kawai Strong Washburn

In 1994 in Kailua-Kona, Hawaii, seven-year-old Nainoa Flores is saved from drowning by a shiver of sharks. His family, struggling to make ends meet amidst the collapse of the sugar cane industry, hails his rescue as a sign of favour from ancient Hawaiian gods. Goodreads Reviews Back to GoodReads

Read More

God Shot, Chelsea Bieker

Drought has settled on the town of Peaches, California. The area of the Central Valley where fourteen-year-old Lacey May and her alcoholic mother live was once an agricultural paradise. Now it’s an environmental disaster, a place of cracked earth and barren raisin farms. In their desperation, residents have turned to […]

Read More

Sassafrass, Cypress & Indigo, Ntozake Shange

As with many ecofeminist novels, the structure is not linear and contains many asides, recipes, spells, letters and other ephemera. Shange explores the relationship between the main characters and their homeland, South Carolina, as well as their more distant connection to Africa through the Black Arts Movement. –Carnegie Library Goodreads […]

Read More

Sea Change, Nancy Kress

In this near-future environmental thriller, rebels who research genetically modified plants try to discover the government mole who is betraying their work. –Milwaukee Journal Sentinal Goodreads Reviews Back to GoodReads

Read More