This looks fantastic! A fairytale/fantasy where surrounding nature strongly intersects with the story. A magical debut novel for readers of Naomi Novik’s Uprooted, Erin Morgenstern’s The Night Circus, and Neil Gaiman’s myth-rich fantasies, The Bear and the Nightingale spins an irresistible spell as it announces the arrival of a singular […]
Read MoreElmet, 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
Read MoreClimate Change Author Spotlight – Octavia Butler
Back to the series Octavia Butler, an African American science fiction writer, was born in 1947 and died in 2006. A Hugo and Nebula award winner, she wrote fairy tales as a young girl. By the time she was a pre-teen she got her first typewriter, ignoring her Aunt Hazel […]
Read MoreThe Green Gold of Borneo, Emin Madi
Click here to return to the series Today we travel to Borneo, to Sabah’s Lost World, a wondrous and isolated basin that surprisingly has not been too explored nor exploited like many other areas in the world that contain such beauty and abundant natural resources, all within a montane ecosystem. […]
Read MoreForgotten Things, Stephen Mullaney-Westwood
The beauty of the Cornish countryside… The innocence of childhood in the 1980’s… An ancient mystery not quite forgotten. Mullaney-Westwood’s first novel is a spiritual coming of age tale mixing haunting faery lore and a deep love for the natural world. Fairy tales are one thing…faeries, are another. ‘A magical […]
Read MoreThe Whale Caller, Zakes Mda
As Zakes Mda’s fifth novel opens, the seaside village of Hermanus is overrun with whale-watchers–foreign tourists determined to see whales in their natural habitat. But when the tourists have gone home, the whale caller lingers at the shoreline, wooing a whale he has named Sharisha with cries from a kelp […]
Read MoreCountdown
Author: © Carol Fiore Series: Book One – The Skye Van Bloem Trilogy Publication Date: May 24, 2018 Ordering: Amazon, Other Social Media: Author Website, Amazon Author Page, Twitter, Facebook, Facebook Groups Back to the Dragonfly Library Chapter 17 At least Skye remembered to take a deep breath and hold […]
Read MoreChimbo Sok
Author: © Stephen Lowe Publication Date: June 1, 2017 Ordering: Amazon UK, Waterstones Social Media: Twitter Chapter 16 — Tea in the Hudson Hungry now, Torval and Dean sucked krill from the surrounding seawater and sang to each other tender whale lullabies, four beats to a bar… The whales swam […]
Read MoreClimate Change Author Spotlight – Marian Womack
Back to the series In this spotlight, I look at how ecology intersects with weird fiction. This has been an interest of mine, but I have done only one similar spotlight–on Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach Trilogy–two years ago. It’s good to come back to this subject. You may also want […]
Read MoreAgam: Filipino Narratives on Uncertainty and Climate Change, Redentor Constantino
Click here to return to the series Welcome to Dragonfly’s new global eco-fiction series, where I explore fiction from around the world dealing with environmental crises. In this feature, I look at, and re-enjoy, Agam, a book project from the Philippines in 2014. Thanks very much to Redentor Constantino, from […]
Read MoreThe Middle Earth Universe, J.R.R. Tolkien
This is the 600th book post made in the years I’ve run Dragonfly, and I wanted to make it special on this fifth anniversary. Perhaps this should have been my first post ever, but it took me a long time to come up with a standard for any sort of […]
Read MoreOn 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 […]
Read MoreCompulsory Games, Robert Aikman
Aickman’s superbly written tales terrify not with standard thrills and gore but through a radical overturning of the laws of nature and everyday life. His territory of the strange, of the “void behind the face of order,” is a surreal region that grotesquely mimics the quotidian: Is that river the […]
Read MoreThe Vorrh Trilogy, Brian Catling
Click here for all, including The Vorrh and The Erstwhile. The richly grotesque Vorrh trilogy describes a quest to rescue the tree of knowledge and return Creation to a state of primal innocence. –The Guardian In the stunning conclusion to Brian Catling’s Vorrh trilogy, the colonial city of Essenwald gives […]
Read MoreIn Search of Staria, Peagum Coleman
This is not only a book for aficionados of the journey and search genre of literature e.g. Lord of the Rings, but will also appeal to those who enjoy a cracking adventure story. It is very interesting to read how a disparate ethnic and genetic mix of people meld together […]
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