When a vegetarian crashes a hunting party: The Shooting Party by Isabel Colegate
I’m not sure how I heard about this novel, only that I had heard that there was an animal rights element to it. Yet in the early pages I struggled …
Fiction
Book Review: Tender is the Flesh by Agustina Bazterrica (translated from the Spanish by Sarah Moses)
In Tender is the Flesh, Agustina Bazterrica expertly crafts a horrifying reality that feels too contemporary to be the future. A virus has decimated the world’s animal population. Societies around …
Review: The Yield by Tara June Winch
I didn’t plan to read the nonfiction book Dark Emu shortly before reading the novel The Yield by Tara June Winch. But I couldn’t think of a better pairing. While …
Book Review: MIGRATIONS by Charlotte McConaghy
Migrations is a stunningly beautiful novel about a woman who has always been running—from her childhood, her mistakes, her memories—and this time, she’s traveling from Greenland to Antarctica, following the …
Book Review: The Bright Side Sanctuary for Animals by Becky Mandelbaum
While the title of Becky Mandelbaum’s The Bright Side Sanctuary for Animals may indicate this is a novel about animals, it is very much more a human novel. Set primarily …
New and upcoming book releases
Sadly, we cannot review everything we receive here at EcoLit Books — but I did want to highlight a few new and newly republished works… The Lives and Deaths of …
Book Review: The Disaster Tourist by Yun Ko-Eun
Eco-tourism has become increasingly popular in recent years, travel intended to help conserve and contribute to remote communities and delicate ecosystems, but…disaster tourism? We’re all familiar with rubbernecking drivers, and …
Book Review: Deb Olin Unferth’s BARN 8
It’s rare to find a novel whose plot centers around animal rescue, and rarer still to encounter one that is deftly written and gets it (mostly) right—which is among the …
Eating meat in third person: The Edible Woman by Margaret Atwood
Published in 1969, The Edible Woman is Margaret Atwood’s first novel. As a vegan, I was curious to read this book because it features a protagonist, Marian, who discovers one …
Book Review: Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead
Olga Tokarczuk’s Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead resists easy categorization. It is a dark comedy, murder mystery, treatise on animal rights, and tribute to English poet …
The best environmental books we’ve read in 2019
Looking back on the year, I’m happy to see that a novel that made our best books list in 2018 won the 2019 Pulitzer Prize: The Overstory by Richard Powers …