Cierra Horton McElroy’s debut novel, Atomic Family, is not an environmental novel of the twenty-first-century, yet its themes of impending nuclear devastation and eco-anxiety nevertheless feel all too real. Atomic Family is the story of Nellie, Dean, and their son, Wilson, with the novel’s main narrative playing out over a couple of days through these …
Alice Elliott Dark’s beautiful, sprawling novel Fellowship Point is about land and stewardship, about nature and conservation, but more than that, it is a book of friendship across the decades and about the complexities of women’s lives, told in part by two extraordinary narrators who experienced nearly a century of life in the world. Agnes …
While Jessie Greengrass’s remarkable novel The High House is set primarily in a grim future, this is not purely dystopian fiction—in fact, it feels far more contemporary, like a novel of our imminent reality. The High House doesn’t depict a world completely transformed by climate change as much as it reveals our world—a world slowly and inevitably ravaged as …
Our good friend Mary Woodbury has created a subreddit devoted to Ecofiction: A place to find meaningful fictional stories about our natural world and humanity’s connection with it. The subreddit explores the wild, crazy, and breathtaking literary trail of ecofiction. Our motto is “blowing your mind with wild words and worlds.” We hope to raise …
In 2016, we began compiling lists of the best books we read that year (new or old, it didn’t matter). And now here we are in 2021, and we’ve got another wonderful list of the best environmental books we’ve read this year. These may not be the books you’ll find in the top lists of …
Living in Southern Oregon, not far north of where Ash Davidson’s Damnation Spring is set, I’ve grown used to passing trucks that are overloaded with timber, and mountainsides bare from clear-cuts. Knowing that this novel is about logging redwoods in the late 1970s, I wasn’t sure how biased I might be, as an reader who is decidedly …
Set on the Gulf Coast of Mississippi in the span of the twelve days before, during, and after Hurricane Katrina makes landfall, Salvage the Bones is the story of 14-year-old Esch and her family, who live on the outskirts of the fictional town of Bois Sauvage on a patch of land they call the “Pit.” …
Charlotte McConaghy, an Australian writer living in Sydney, is the author of Migrations and Once There Were Wolves. Here, she chats with EcoLit Books about her new novel about the reintroduction of wolves to the Scottish Highlands. Q: As with the birds in Migrations, your characters in Once There Were Wolves have a deep knowledge of the animals …
Charlotte McConaghy’s Once There Were Wolves shares much in common with her previous novel, Migrations — the journey of a troubled young woman hoping to save the animals she loves, while also fighting the demons of her past. Yet despite these echoes, Once There Were Wolves is entirely unique in its story of biologist Inti Flynn, who …
ASLE (The Association for the Study of Literature and Environment) is holding its conference online from July 26 to August 6. Keynote presentations include: Aimee Nezhukumatathil, poet and author of World of Wonders Brionté McCorkle, Executive Director of Georgia Conservation Voters Anthropologist and geographer Zoe Todd and sound artist AM Kanngieser, collaborating on “Environmental Kin …
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 Dark Emu deconstructs colonial myths about Australian Aboriginal civilizations, The Yield illustrates how these myths were used to justify tearing apart families and cultures. In …
