The best environmental books we’ve read in 2025
We published 28 book reviews this year and promoted many more. Out of all the books we’ve read, here are some of our favorites. We hope you enjoy them — and we thank …
Fiction
New and forthcoming environmental books (December 2025)
As we approach the end of the year I’m pleased to share another impressive selection of newly published (or soon-to-be-published) environmental books. Enjoy! Cowbells on the Kill Floor: Veganism, Legacy …
Bloom Again, A Novel by Marybeth Holleman
University of Alaska Press, 2025 Edward O. Wilson, a pioneer of evolutionary biology, once wrote, “Humanities will have to blend with the sciences, because technology is going to demand the …
Book Review: The Tortoise’s Tale by Kendra Coulter
Years ago, when I was in the Galápagos Islands, a fellow traveler asked how long tortoises live. Our guide’s answer was: “We don’t know.” No human has yet lived long …
Book Review: North of the Sunlit River by Jessica Bryant Klagmann
In her novel North of the Sunlit River, Jessica Bryant Klagmann’s characters face grief and loss amid beautiful depictions of the natural world, from Alaska to New Mexico. Eila Jacobsen is …
Book Review: The Island of Last Things by Emma Sloley
Emma Sloley’s, The Island Of Last Things, pulls no punches. It is a warning without hesitation, a tragic imagining of an end that is far too plausible, too close to …
Habitat, by Case Q. Kerns
Black Lawrence Press, August 2025 In Habitat, a delectably creepy novel-in-stories, set slightly in the future, Case Q. Kerns imagines how late-stage capitalism plays itself out in the worst possible …
Book Review Flashback: Strange As This Weather Has Been by Ann Pancake
In 2014, Midge Raymond reviewed a novel that paved the way for contemporary eco-literature, a powerful indictment of the horrors of mountaintop removal mining. Ann Pancake’s powerful novel Strange as This Weather …
Book Review: Little Great Island
A Novel, by Kate Woodworth Sibylline Press, 2025 Reviewed by JoeAnn Hart Our lives are like islands in the sea, or like trees in the forest… the trees commingle their …
Book Review: Jane and Dan at the End of the World by Colleen Oakley
This fun, witty novel opens on author Jane Brooks being questioned by police, not only as a witness to a crime but also because her novel was found in the …
Book Review Flashback: The Jungle by Upton Sinclair
Midge Raymond reviewed this iconic book back in 2012, with a unique take: I recently revisited Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle—the original edition published by a socialist newspaper in 1905, not the …