Climate Change

(32 books)

Some of our best writers tackle the issues around climate change in fiction and non-fiction - with hope and desperation.
Flight Behavior

Flight Behavior

Barbara Kingsolver

3.812012Nature
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Flight Behavior takes on one of the most contentious subjects of our time: climate change. With a deft and versatile empathy, Kingsolver dissects the motives that drive denial and belief in a precarious world.Flight Behavior transfixes from its opening scene, when a young woman's narrow experience of life is thrown wide with the force of a raging fire. In the lyrical language of her native Appalachia, Barbara Kingsolver bares the rich, tarnished humanity of her novel's inhabitants and unearths the modern complexities of rural existence. Characters and readers alike are quickly carried beyond familiar territory here, into the unsettled ground of science, faith, and everyday truces between reason and conviction.Dellarobia Turnbow is a restless farm wife who gave up her own plans when she accidentally became pregnant at seventeen. Now, after a decade of domestic disharmony on a failing farm, she has settled for permanent disappointment but seeks momentary escape through an obsessive flirtation with a younger man. As she hikes up a mountain road behind her house to a secret tryst, she encounters a shocking sight: a silent, forested valley filled with what looks like a lake of fire. She can only understand it as a cautionary miracle, but it sparks a raft of other explanations from scientists, religious leaders, and the media. The bewildering emergency draws rural farmers into unexpected acquaintance with urbane journalists, opportunists, sightseers, and a striking biologist with his own stake in the outcome. As the community lines up to judge the woman and her miracle, Dellarobia confronts her family, her church, her town, and a larger world, in a flight toward truth that could undo all she has ever believed.

The Great Derangement

The Great Derangement

Amitav Ghosh

4.062016Nature
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Are we deranged? The acclaimed Indian novelist Amitav Ghosh argues that future generations may well think so. How else to explain our imaginative failure in the face of global warming? In his first major book of nonfiction since In an Antique Land, Ghosh examines our inability—at the level of literature, history, and politics—to grasp the scale and violence of climate change.The extreme nature of today’s climate events, Ghosh asserts, makes them peculiarly resistant to contemporary modes of thinking and imagining. This is particularly true of serious literary fiction: hundred-year storms and freakish tornadoes simply feel too improbable for the novel; they are automatically consigned to other genres. In the writing of history, too, the climate crisis has sometimes led to gross simplifications; Ghosh shows that the history of the carbon economy is a tangled global story with many contradictory and counterintuitive elements.Ghosh ends by suggesting that politics, much like literature, has become a matter of personal moral reckoning rather than an arena of collective action. But to limit fiction and politics to individual moral adventure comes at a great cost. The climate crisis asks us to imagine other forms of human existence—a task to which fiction, Ghosh argues, is best suited of all cultural forms. His book serves as a great writer’s summons to confront the most urgent task of our time.

Weather

Weather

Jenny Offill

3.562020Climate Change
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Lizzie Benson slid into her job as a librarian without a traditional degree. But this gives her a vantage point from which to practice her other calling: she is a fake shrink. For years, she has tended to her God-haunted mother and her recovering addict brother. They have both stabilized for the moment, but Lizzie has little chance to spend her new free time with husband and son before her old mentor, Sylvia Liller, makes a proposal. She's become famous for her prescient podcast, Hell and High Water, and wants to hire Lizzie to answer the mail she receives: from left-wingers worried about climate change and right wingers worried about the decline of western civilization.As Lizzie dives into this polarized world, she begins to wonder what it means to keep tending your own garden once you've seen the flames beyond its walls. When her brother becomes a father and Sylvia a recluse, Lizzie is forced to address the limits of her own experience—but still she tries to save everyone, using everything she's learned about empathy and despair, conscience and collusion, from her years of wandering the library stacks... And all the while the voices of the city keep floating in—funny, disturbing, and increasingly mad.

The Road

The Road

Cormac McCarthy

4.132006Horror
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A post-apocalyptic classic set in a burned-out America, a father and his young son walk under a darkened sky, heading slowly for the coast. They have no idea what, if anything, awaits them there. The Road is a masterpiece of American fiction from Cormac McCarthy.The landscape is destroyed. Nothing moves save the ash on the wind. Cruel, lawless men stalk the roadside, lying in wait. Attempting to survive in this brave new world, the young boy and his protector have nothing but a pistol to defend themselves. They must keep walking.In this unflinching study of the best and worst of humankind, Cormac McCarthy boldly divines a future without hope, but one in which, miraculously, this young family may yet find tenderness.Adapted into a critically-acclaimed film starring Viggo Mortensen and Charlize Theron.EndorsementsWinner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.'The Road made me cry for days.' — Emma Donoghue, author of Room and Haven.'[T]he most important environmental book ever written.' — George Monbiot, author of Feral and Regenesis.

Solar

Solar

Ian McEwan

3.281985Science Fiction
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Solar traces the arc of a Nobel Prize–winning physicist’s ambitions and self-deception.Dr. Michael Beard’s best work is behind him. Trading on his reputation, he speaks for enormous fees, lends his name to the letterheads of renowned scientific institutions, and halfheartedly heads a government-backed initiative tackling global warming. Meanwhile, Michael’s fifth marriage is floundering due to his incessant womanizing. When his professional and personal worlds collide in a freak accident, an opportunity presents itself for Michael to extricate himself from his marital problems, reinvigorate his career, and save the world from environmental disaster. But can a man who has made a mess of his life clean up the messes of humanity?EndorsementsFrom the Booker Prize–winning author of Atonement.“totally gripping and entirely hilarious” — The Wall Street Journal

Braiding Sweetgrass

Braiding Sweetgrass

Robin Wall Kimmerer

4.562013Essays
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As a botanist, Robin Wall Kimmerer asks questions of nature with the tools of science.As a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, she embraces indigenous teachings that consider plants and animals to be our oldest teachers.Kimmerer brings these two lenses of knowledge together. Drawing on her life as an indigenous scientist, a mother, and a woman, she shows how other living beings offer us gifts and lessons, even if we've forgotten how to hear their voices.Endorsements"A mesmerizing storyteller with deep compassion and memorable prose." — Publishers Weekly"Anyone interested in natural history, botany, protecting nature, or Native American culture will love it." — Library Journal"Takes us on a journey that is every bit as mythic as it is scientific, as sacred as it is historical, as clever as it is wise." — Elizabeth Gilbert

How Beautiful We Were

How Beautiful We Were

Imbolo Mbue

3.952021Historical Fiction
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"We should have known the end was near."So begins Imbolo Mbue’s powerful second novel, How Beautiful We Were. Set in the fictional African village of Kosawa, it tells the story of a people living in fear amidst environmental degradation wrought by an American oil company.Pipeline spills have rendered farmlands infertile. Children are dying from drinking toxic water. Promises of clean-up and financial reparations to the villagers are made—and ignored. The country’s government, led by a brazen dictator, exists to serve its own interests. Left with few choices, the people of Kosawa decide to fight back. Their struggle would last for decades and come at a steep price.Told through the perspective of a generation of children and the family of a girl named Thula who grows up to become a revolutionary, How Beautiful We Were is a masterful exploration of what happens when the reckless drive for profit, coupled with the ghost of colonialism, comes up against one community’s determination to hold onto its ancestral land and a young woman’s willingness to sacrifice everything for the sake of her people’s freedom.Endorsements"The unforgettable story of a community on the wrong end of Western greed, How Beautiful We Were will enthrall you, appall you, and show you what is possible when a few people stand up and say this is not right. A masterful novel by a spellbinding writer engaged with the most urgent questions of our day." — David Ebershoff, bestselling author of The Danish Girl

Oryx and Crake

Oryx and Crake

Margaret Atwood

4.052003Fantasy
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Oryx and Crake is at once an unforgettable love story and a compelling vision of the future. Snowman, known as Jimmy before mankind was overwhelmed by a plague, is struggling to survive in a world where he may be the last human, and mourning the loss of his best friend, Crake, and the beautiful and elusive Oryx whom they both loved. In search of answers, Snowman embarks on a journey—with the help of the green-eyed Children of Crake—through the lush wilderness that was so recently a great city, until powerful corporations took mankind on an uncontrolled genetic engineering ride. Margaret Atwood projects us into a near future that is both all too familiar and beyond our imagining.

Gold Fame Citrus

Gold Fame Citrus

Claire Vaye Watkins

3.302015Science Fiction
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In a parched southern California of the near future, Luz, once the poster child for the country’s conservation movement, and Ray, an army deserter turned surfer, are squatting in a starlet’s abandoned mansion. Most “Mojavs,” prevented by armed vigilantes from freely crossing borders to lusher regions, have allowed themselves to be evacuated to encampments in the east. Holdouts like Ray and Luz subsist on rationed cola and water, and whatever they can loot, scavenge, and improvise.For the moment, the couple’s fragile love, which somehow blooms in this arid place, seems enough. But when they cross paths with a mysterious child, the thirst for a better future begins.Immensely moving, profoundly disquieting, and mind-blowingly original, Watkins’s novel explores the myths we believe about others and tell about ourselves, the double-edged power of our most cherished relationships, and the shape of hope in a precarious future that may be our own.

We Will Be Jaguars

We Will Be Jaguars

Nemonte Nenquimo

4.632024Nature
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From a fearless, internationally acclaimed activist, We Will Be Jaguars is an impassioned memoir about an indigenous childhood, a clash of cultures, and the fight to save the Amazon rainforest and protect her people.Born into the Waorani tribe of Ecuador’s Amazon rainforest—one of the last to be contacted by missionaries in the 1950s—Nemonte Nenquimo had a singular upbringing. She was taught about plant medicines, foraging, oral storytelling, and shamanism by her elders. She played barefoot in the forest and didn’t walk on pavement, or see a car, until she was a teenager and left to study with an evangelical missionary group in the city. But after Nemonte’s ancestors began appearing in her dreams, pleading with her to return and embrace her own culture, she listened.Nemonte returned to the forest and traditional ways of life and became one of the most forceful voices in climate change activism. She spearheaded an alliance of Indigenous nations across the Upper Amazon and led her people to a landmark victory against Big Oil, protecting over a half million acres of primary rainforest.We Will Be Jaguars is an astonishing memoir by an equally astonishing woman. Nemonte digs into generations of oral history, uprooting centuries of conquest, and hacking away at racist notions of Indigenous peoples. Ultimately, she reveals a life story as rich, harsh, and vital as the Amazon rainforest herself.

Future Home of the Living God

Future Home of the Living God

Louise Erdrich

3.592017Fantasy
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Louise Erdrich paints a startling portrait of a young woman fighting for her life and her unborn child against oppressive forces that manifest in the wake of a cataclysmic event in this dystopian novel. Twenty-six-year-old Cedar Hawk Songmaker, adopted daughter of a pair of Minneapolis liberals, is as disturbed and uncertain as the rest of America around her. But for Cedar, this change is profound and deeply personal. She is four months pregnant.Though she wants to tell the adoptive parents who raised her from infancy, Cedar first feels compelled to find her birth mother, Mary Potts, an Ojibwe, to understand both her and her baby’s origins. As Cedar goes back to her own biological beginnings, society around her begins to disintegrate, fueled by a swelling panic about the end of humanity.

Juice

Juice

Tim Winton

4.602024Novels
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Two fugitives, a man and a child, drive across a stony desert. As dawn breaks, they roll into an abandoned mine site. They’re exhausted, traumatised and desperate, and this is a forsaken place, but as a refuge it’s the most promising they’ve seen. The child peers at the field of desolation. The man thinks to himself, this could work. Problem is, they’re not alone...So begins a searing, epic journey through a life where the challenge is not only to survive; it’s keeping your humanity if you do.Survival is only the beginning. Juice is a stunning novel for fans of Station Eleven and The Road by twice Booker-shortlisted author Tim Winton.Endorsements"A hold-your-breath adventure set in an utterly plausible, sun-hammered future, Juice will stab your conscience and break your heart." — Emma Donoghue

Field Notes from a Catastrophe

Field Notes from a Catastrophe

Elizabeth Kolbert

4.042006Nature
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Known for her insightful and thought-provoking journalism, New Yorker writer Elizabeth Kolbert now tackles the controversial subject of global warming. Americans have been warned since the late nineteen-seventies that the buildup of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere threatens to melt the polar ice sheets and irreversibly change our climate. With little done since then to alter this dangerous course, now is the moment to salvage our future. By the end of the century, the world will likely be hotter than it's been in the last two million years, and the sweeping consequences of this change will determine the future of life on earth for generations to come.In writing that is both clear and unbiased, Kolbert approaches this monumental problem from every angle. She travels to the Arctic, interviews researchers and environmentalists, explains the science and the studies, draws frightening parallels to lost ancient civilizations, unpacks the politics, and presents the personal tales of those who are being affected most—the people who make their homes near the poles and, in an eerie foreshadowing, are watching their worlds disappear. Growing out of a groundbreaking three-part series for the New Yorker, Field Notes from a Catastrophe brings the environment into the consciousness of the American people and asks what, if anything, can be done, and how we can save our planet.An argument for the urgent danger of global warming in a book that is sure to be as influential as Rachel Carson's Silent Spring.

State of Fear

State of Fear

Michael Crichton

3.702004Adventure
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In Paris, a physicist dies after performing a laboratory experiment for a beautiful visitor.In the jungles of Malaysia, a mysterious buyer purchases deadly cavitation technology, built to his specifications.In Vancouver, a small research submarine is leased for use in the waters off New Guinea.In Tokyo, in Los Angeles, in Antarctica, in the Solomon Islands... an intelligence agent races to put all the pieces together to prevent a global catastrophe.

Barkskins

Barkskins

Annie Proulx

3.822016Nature
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In the late seventeenth century two penniless young Frenchmen, René Sel and Charles Duquet, arrive in New France. Bound to a feudal lord, a seigneur, for three years in exchange for land, they become wood-cutters—barkskins. René suffers extraordinary hardship, oppressed by the forest he is charged with clearing. He is forced to marry a Mi’kmaw woman and their descendants live trapped between two inimical cultures. But Duquet, crafty and ruthless, runs away from the seigneur, becomes a fur trader, then sets up a timber business. Proulx tells the stories of the descendants of Sel and Duquet over three hundred years—their travels across North America, to Europe, China, and New Zealand, under stunningly brutal conditions—the revenge of rivals, accidents, pestilence, Indian attacks, and cultural annihilation. Over and over again, they seize what they can of a presumed infinite resource, leaving the modern-day characters face to face with possible ecological collapse.

All Over Creation

All Over Creation

Ruth Ozeki

3.832003Modern And Contemporary Fiction
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Yumi Fuller hasn't set foot in her parents' farm in Idaho since she ran away when she was fifteen. Now, twenty-five years later, the prodigal daughter — and now a struggling single mother of three — is returning home, desperate to win back the love of her ailing father and to confront her best friend and her conflicted past. Still spirited and rebellious, she finds a world — and her parents — changed beyond recognition. In the weeks and months to come, Yumi breathes life back into her parents' farm. And with the arrival of a group of young anti-GM activists, the Seeds of Resistance, she finds herself caught up in a new revolution. All Over Creation is a moving exploration of the dichotomies of love and responsibility and a celebratory tale of the capacity for renewal that resides within us all.

The Uninhabitable Earth

The Uninhabitable Earth

David Wallace-Wells

4.012019Nature
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It is worse, much worse, than you think. If your anxiety about global warming is dominated by fears of sea-level rise, you are barely scratching the surface of what terrors are possible. In California, wildfires now rage year-round, destroying thousands of homes. Across the US, "500-year" storms pummel communities month after month, and floods displace tens of millions annually.This is only a preview of the changes to come. And they are coming fast. Without a revolution in how billions of humans conduct their lives, parts of the Earth could become close to uninhabitable, and other parts horrifically inhospitable, as soon as the end of this century.In his travelogue of our near future, David Wallace-Wells brings into stark relief the climate troubles that await—food shortages, refugee emergencies, and other crises that will reshape the globe. But the world will be remade by warming in more profound ways as well, transforming our politics, our culture, our relationship to technology, and our sense of history. It will be all-encompassing, shaping and distorting nearly every aspect of human life as it is lived today.Like An Inconvenient Truth and Silent Spring before it, The Uninhabitable Earth is both a meditation on the devastation we have brought upon ourselves and an impassioned call to action. For just as the world was brought to the brink of catastrophe within the span of a lifetime, the responsibility to avoid it now belongs to a single generation.

It's Not That Radical

It's Not That Radical

Mikaela Loach

4.512023Sociology
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For too long, representations of climate action in the mainstream media have been white-washed, green-washed and diluted to be made compatible with capitalism. We are living in an economic system which pursues profit above all else; harmful, oppressive systems that heavily contribute to the climate crisis, and environmental consequences that have been toned down to the masses.Tackling the climate crisis requires us to visit the roots of poverty, capitalist exploitation, police brutality and legal injustice. Climate justice offers the real possibility of huge leaps towards racial equality and collective liberation as it aims to dismantle the very foundations of these issues.In this book, Mikaela Loach offers a fresh and radical perspective for real climate action that could drastically change the world as we know it for the benefit of us all.Written with candour and hope, It's Not That Radical will galvanise readers to take action, offering an accessible and transformative appraisal of our circumstances to help mobilise a majority for the future of our planet.EndorsementsWinner of Bookshop.org's Non-Fiction Annual Indie Champions Award

Not the End of the World

Not the End of the World

Hannah Ritchie

4.272024Economics
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We are bombarded by doomsday headlines that tell us the soil won't be able to support crops, fish will vanish from our oceans, that we should reconsider having children.But in this bold, radically hopeful book, data scientist Hannah Ritchie argues that if we zoom out, a very different picture emerges. The data shows we've made so much progress on these problems, and so fast, that we could be on track to achieve true sustainability for the first time in history.Packed with the latest research, practical guidance and enlightening graphics, this book will make you rethink almost everything you've been told about the environment, from the virtues of eating locally and living in the countryside, to the evils of overpopulation, plastic straws and palm oil. It will give you the tools to understand what works, what doesn't and what we urgently need to focus on so we can leave a sustainable planet for future generations.These problems are big. But they are solvable. We are not doomed. We can build a better future for everyone. Let's turn that opportunity into reality.Feeling anxious, powerless or confused about the future of our planet? This book will transform how you see our biggest environmental problems — and how we can solve them.Endorsements"Not the End of the World is an inspiring data-mine which gives us not only real guidance, but the most necessary ingredient of hope... practical and truly essential" — Margaret Atwood, TED2023"Truly essential" — Margaret Atwood

Doughnut Economics

Doughnut Economics

Kate Raworth

4.182017Business
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Economics is broken. It has failed to predict, let alone prevent, financial crises that have shaken the foundations of our societies. Its outdated theories have permitted a world in which extreme poverty persists while the wealth of the super-rich grows year on year. And its blind spots have led to policies that are degrading the living world on a scale that threatens all of our futures.Can it be fixed? In Doughnut Economics, Oxford academic Kate Raworth identifies seven critical ways in which mainstream economics has led us astray, and sets out a roadmap for bringing humanity into a sweet spot that meets the needs of all within the means of the planet. En route, she deconstructs the character of ‘rational economic man’ and explains what really makes us tick. She reveals how an obsession with equilibrium has left economists helpless when facing the boom and bust of the real-world economy. She highlights the dangers of ignoring the role of energy and nature’s resources – and the far-reaching implications for economic growth when we take them into account. And in the process, she creates a new, cutting-edge economic model that is fit for the 21st century – one in which a doughnut-shaped compass points the way to human progress.Ambitious, radical and rigorously argued, Doughnut Economics promises to reframe and redraw the future of economics for a new generation.Endorsements'I read this book with the excitement that the people of his day must have read John Maynard Keynes’s General Theory. It is brilliant, thrilling and revolutionary.' — George Monbiot'Brimming with creativity, Raworth reclaims economics from the dust of academia and puts it to the service of a better world.' — Tim Jackson, author of Prosperity Without Growth

The Serviceberry

The Serviceberry

Robin Wall Kimmerer

4.882024Nature
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As an Indigenous scientist and the author of Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer harvests serviceberries alongside the birds and considers the ethic of reciprocity that lies at the heart of the gift economy. How, she asks, can we learn from Indigenous wisdom and the plant world to reimagine what we value most? Our economy is rooted in scarcity, competition, and the hoarding of resources, and we have surrendered our values to a system that actively harms what we love. Meanwhile, the serviceberry’s relationship with the natural world is an embodiment of reciprocity, interconnectedness, and gratitude. The tree distributes its wealth—its abundance of sweet, juicy berries—to meet the needs of its natural community. And this distribution ensures its own survival. As Kimmerer explains, “Serviceberries show us another model, one based upon reciprocity, where wealth comes from the quality of your relationships, not from the illusion of self-sufficiency.” The Serviceberry is an antidote to the broken relationships and misguided goals of our times, and a reminder that “hoarding won’t save us, all flourishing is mutual.”A bold and inspiring vision for how to orient our lives around gratitude, reciprocity, and community, based on the lessons of the natural world.Endorsements#1 New York Times bestselling author of Braiding Sweetgrass“A great teacher, and her words are a hymn of love to the world.” — Elizabeth Gilbert

The War Below

The War Below

Ernest Scheyder

4.022024Business
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Acclaimed Reuters reporter Ernest Scheyder reveals the trillion-dollar battle for the resources to power our future.Tough choices loom if the world wants to go green. The United States and other countries must decide where and how to procure the materials that make our renewable energy economy possible. To build electric vehicles, solar panels, cell phones, and millions of other devices means the world must dig more mines to extract lithium, copper, cobalt, rare earths, and nickel. But mines are deeply unpopular, even as they have a role to play in fighting climate change. These tensions have sparked a worldwide reckoning over the sourcing of these critical minerals, and no one understands the complexities of these issues better than Ernest Scheyder, whose exclusive access has allowed him to report from the front lines on the key players in this global battle to power our future.This is not a story of tree-hugging activists, but rather of industry titans, scientists, and policymakers jostling over how best to save the planet. Scheyder explores how a proposed lithium mine in Nevada would help global automakers slash their dependence on fossil fuels, but developing that mine could cause the extinction of a flower found nowhere else on the planet. A hedge fund manager’s attempt to resuscitate rare earths mining in California relies on Chinese expertise, exposing the paradox in Washington’s quest for mineral independence. The fight to end child labor in Africa’s mining sector is a key reason, supporters contend, to dig out a vast reserve of cobalt and nickel under Minnesota’s vulnerable wetlands. An international mining conglomerate’s plan to extract copper for electric vehicles deep beneath Arizona’s desert would destroy a Native American holy site, fueling tough questions about what matters more.In The War Below, Scheyder crafts a business story that matters to everyone. If China continues to dominate production of these critical minerals, it will have a profound impact on the geopolitical order. Beyond China, countries such as Bolivia, Indonesia, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo aim to wield their vast reserves of key minerals. There are no easy answers when it comes to energy. Scheyder paints a powerfully honest and nuanced picture of what is needed to fight climate change and secure energy independence, revealing how America and the rest of the world’s hunt for the “new oil” directly affects us all.

Land of Milk and Honey

Land of Milk and Honey

C Pam Zhang

4.002023Science Fiction
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A smog has spread. Food crops are disappearing. A chef escapes her career in London to take a job at a decadent mountaintop colony seemingly free of the world's troubles. There, her enigmatic employer and his visionary daughter have built a lush new life for the global elite, one that reawakens the chef to the pleasures of taste, touch and her own body.In this atmosphere of hidden wonders and seductive violence, the chef's boundaries undergo a thrilling erosion. Soon she is pushed to the center of a startling attempt to reshape the world far beyond the plate.Sensuous and surprising, joyous and bitingly sharp, told in alluring language, Land of Milk and Honey is a striking novel about food, sex and the intricacies of desire and longing.A rapturous novel about a young chef whose discovery of pleasure alters her life and, indirectly, the worldEndorsements"A rich novel of ideas" — The Guardian"A tasty treat" — iNews"A genius balance of page-turning and lyrical prose" — The Independent"A sharp, sensual piece of art. When I read I'm always searching for pleasure, for the want, and this book helped me feel something" — Raven Leilani"It's rare to read anything that feels this unique. A richly imagined, ambitious, and haunting novel" — Gabrielle Zevin"Truly exceptional" — Roxane Gay"A blazing writer" — Daisy Johnson"Truly gifted" — Sebastian Barry"An arrestingly original writer" — The Sunday Times

The Overstory

The Overstory

Richard Powers

4.292018Nature
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An Air Force loadmaster in the Vietnam War is shot out of the sky, then saved by falling into a banyan.An artist inherits a hundred years of photographic portraits, all of the same doomed American chestnut.A hard-partying undergraduate in the late 1980s electrocutes herself, dies and is sent back into life by creatures of air and light.A hearing- and speech-impaired scientist discovers that trees are communicating with one another.These four, and five other strangers – each summoned in different ways by trees – are brought together in a last and violent stand to save the continent’s few remaining acres of virgin forest.There is a world alongside ours – vast, slow, interconnected, resourceful, magnificently inventive and almost invisible to us.This is the story of a handful of people who learn how to see that world and who are drawn up into its unfolding catastrophe.

Private Rites

Private Rites

Julia Armfield

4.452024Horror
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It’s been raining for a long time now, for so long that the lands have reshaped themselves and the cities have retreated to higher storeys. Old places have been lost. Arcane rituals and religions have crept back into practice.Sisters Isla, Irene and Agnes have not spoken in some time when their estranged father dies. A famous architect revered for making the new world navigable, he had long cut himself off from public life. They find themselves uncertain of how to grieve his passing when everything around them seems to be ending anyway.As the sisters come together to clear the grand glass house that is the pinnacle of his legacy, they begin to sense that the magnetic influence of their father lives on through it. Soon it becomes clear that others have also taken an interest in both his estate and in them, and that perhaps their inheritance may not be theirs alone.The bestselling author of Our Wives Under the Sea returns with a stunning, unsettling novel following three sisters navigating queer love and faith at the end of the world.Endorsements‘Julia Armfield is one of my favourite writers’ — Florence Welch‘A writer whose next move you wouldn’t want to miss’ — Observer‘Armfield is an enormous, gut-wrenching talent’ — Daisy Johnson, author of Sisters‘Armfield's distinct voice is her singular, visceral and eerie’ — Sinéad Gleeson, author of Constellations‘Private Rites has the elemental power of a thunderstorm and the thrilling emotional honesty of a first kiss. Julia Armfield is an era-defining writer’ — Kaliane Bradley, author of The Ministry of Time

Parable of the Sower

Parable of the Sower

Octavia E Butler

4.251993Fantasy
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When global climate change and economic crises lead to social chaos in the early 2020s, California becomes full of dangers, from pervasive water shortage to masses of vagabonds who will do anything to live to see another day.Fifteen-year-old Lauren Olamina lives inside a gated community with her preacher father, family, and neighbors, sheltered from the surrounding anarchy. In a society where any vulnerability is a risk, she suffers from hyperempathy, a debilitating sensitivity to others' pain.Precocious and clear-eyed, Lauren must make her voice heard in order to protect her loved ones from the imminent disasters her small community stubbornly ignores. But what begins as a fight for survival soon leads to something much more: the birth of a new faith...and a startling vision of human destiny.This highly acclaimed post-apocalyptic novel of hope and terror from award-winning author Octavia E. Butler.Endorsements“pairs well with 1984 or The Handmaid's Tale” — John Green, New York Times.

The Left Hand of Darkness

The Left Hand of Darkness

Ursula K Le Guin

4.451969Science Fiction Fantasy
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A lone human ambassador is sent to the icebound planet of Winter, a world without sexual prejudice, where the inhabitants’ gender is fluid. His goal is to facilitate Winter’s inclusion in a growing intergalactic civilization. But to do so he must bridge the gulf between his own views and those of the strange, intriguing culture he encounters...Embracing the aspects of psychology, society, and human emotion on an alien world, The Left Hand of Darkness stands as a landmark achievement in the annals of intellectual science fiction.EndorsementsWinner of the Hugo and Nebula Awards.

American War

American War

Omar El Akkad

3.802017Science Fiction
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Sarat Chestnut, born in Louisiana, is only six when the Second American Civil War breaks out in 2074. But even she knows that oil is outlawed, that Louisiana is half underwater, that unmanned drones fill the sky. And when her father is killed and her family is forced into Camp Patience for displaced persons, she quickly begins to be shaped by her particular time and place until, finally, through the influence of a mysterious functionary, she is turned into a deadly instrument of war. Telling her story is her nephew, Benjamin Chestnut, born during war – part of the Miraculous Generation – now an old man confronting the dark secret of his past, his family’s role in the conflict and, in particular, that of his aunt, a woman who saved his life while destroying untold others.

Theory of Bastards

Theory of Bastards

Audrey Schulman

4.022018Science Fiction
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Francine decided to share her MacArthur award with the Foundation so that she could study a group of remarkable animals, gentle and intelligent – the perfect creatures to certify her astonishing theory of reproduction, a revolutionary concept that has already changed genetic testing and unmasked public figures and past presidents.As Francine learns more about her fascinating subjects, we slowly discover that she has access to the most advanced technology: “bodyware,” the lifelike devices that have replaced cellphones, computers, watches, television—most every means of communication. This near-future world is utterly dependent on these little understood mechanisms and implants.And so when the terrible, dry winds sweep out of the abandoned places in America, silencing all devices, Francine and the man she has grown to love make a decision that will determine if they’ll face a premature ending or, maybe, find a chance to start life over.This superb literary novel can’t be characterized as dystopian or science fiction. Audrey Schulman has written an absorbing, recognizable story, a book that is humane, generous and surprising. Readers will shiver as they keep turning the pages.

Black Wave

Black Wave

Michelle Tea

3.822016Science Fiction
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Desperate to quell her addiction to drugs, disastrous romance, and nineties San Francisco, Michelle heads south for LA. But soon it's officially announced that the world will end in one year, and life in the sprawling metropolis becomes increasingly weird.While living in an abandoned bookstore, dating Matt Dillon, and keeping an eye on the encroaching apocalypse, Michelle begins a new novel, a sprawling and meta-textual exploration to complement her promises of maturity and responsibility. But as she tries to make queer love and art without succumbing to self-destructive vice, the boundaries between storytelling and everyday living begin to blur, and Michelle wonders how much she'll have to compromise her artistic process if she's going to properly ride out doomsday.

The Dosadi Experiment

The Dosadi Experiment

Frank Herbert

3.831977Science Fiction Fantasy
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Beyond the God Wall. Generations of a tormented human-alien people, caged on a toxic planet, conditioned by constant hunger and war — this is the Dosadi Experiment, and it has succeeded too well. For the Dosadi have bred for vengeance as well as cunning, and they have learned how to pass through the shimmering God Wall to exact their dreadful revenge on the universe that created them...From author Frank Herbert, creator of the Dune series. The Dosadi Experiment.

Orbital

Orbital

Samantha Harvey

4.312023Science Fiction
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A slender novel of epic power and the winner of the Booker Prize 2024, Orbital deftly snapshots one day in the lives of six women and men traveling through space. Selected for one of the last space station missions of its kind before the program is dismantled, these astronauts and cosmonauts—from America, Russia, Italy, Britain, and Japan—have left their lives behind to travel at a speed of over seventeen thousand miles an hour as the earth reels below. We glimpse moments of their earthly lives through brief communications with family, their photos and talismans; we watch them whip up dehydrated meals, float in gravity-free sleep, and exercise in regimented routines to prevent atrophying muscles; we witness them form bonds that will stand between them and utter solitude. Most of all, we are with them as they behold and record their silent blue planet. Their experiences of sixteen sunrises and sunsets and the bright, blinking constellations of the galaxy are at once breathtakingly awesome and surprisingly intimate.Profound and contemplative, Orbital is a moving elegy to our environment and planet.