Patti Smith wrote this in her forties, a short book about being a child in southern New Jersey — the fields behind the house, the woolgatherers she imagined moving through them at dusk, a slaughterhouse, a cloud museum, her brother…
Jon Krakauer
Krakauer was sent to Everest by a magazine to write about the commercialization of the mountain and summited on May 10, 1996, the day a storm caught multiple teams high on the peak. Eight people died that day, including both…
Silvia Moreno-Garcia
Noir set in 1943 in a small mountain town in Veracruz, Mexico. Ulises is a con man who works through the mail and marries lonely women for their money. His current mark is Perla, a spinster who owns a boardinghouse…
Andrea Wulf
Alexander von Humboldt was the most famous scientist in the world in his lifetime and is now mostly a list of place names. Wulf brings him back: Five years in South America, climbing Chimborazo higher than anyone had gone, and…
Robert Macfarlane
The question posed by the title of celebrated British nature writer Robert Macfarlane’s keenly felt study of rivers is answered in the first few pages by his nine-year-old son: “Duh.” Yet, self-evident values are not always treated self evidentally. In…
Allegra Goodman
There’s little in the opening pages to suggest this 2025 novel will turn into a great adventure yarn replete with the hand-knife beheading of an attacking polar bear. It’s the early 1500s and orphaned French noblewoman Marguerite de la Rocque…
Percival Everett
Huckleberry Finn from Jim’s side, and the first thing Everett does is give him back his mind. The slave dialect is a performance the enslaved put on for white people and drop the second they’re alone — Jim teaches the…
Natalie Leon
The old Japanese calendar splits the year into twenty-four sekki and then into seventy-two ko — microseasons of about five days each, with names like east wind melts the ice and rotten grass becomes fireflies. Leon studied tea and spent…
Michael Newton
The first of therapist Michael Newton’s “soul” books, from 1994, and the one that started the whole life-between-lives field. He shares twenty-nine cases, transcribed, of subjects under deep hypnosis describing what happens after death. There’s a passage, a reception by…
Graham Greene
In 1935, Greene, thirty and with no relevant experience whatsoever, walked across the interior of Liberia with his twenty-three-year-old cousin Barbara, a cook, and a line of carriers, on a route where the map said nothing but “Cannibals.” They spent…
Charles Cumming
The second Lachlan Kite spy book, and it splits the same way the first one did. In 1993, Kite is a young officer sent into post-Soviet Russia under cover as an English teacher, running an exfiltration of a bioweapons scientist…
Naina Kumar
Neelu Pillai flies to Scotland for her estranged father’s wedding intending to keep her head down. Instead, she hooks up with a local the night before, then delivers a tipsy tirade at the rehearsal dinner that sends the bride running.…
Tana French
This the last book in French’s Cal Hooper series. Rachel Holohan, about to be engaged to the son of the local big man, is found drowned in the river. Her father wants Cal to look into it, which is the…
Charles Cumming
This is the third Lachlan Kite spy novel. In 1995, he’s sent to West Africa to catch a war criminal from the Rwandan genocide, an operation that gets people killed and leaves a debt. In the present, the same man…
Rebecca Wragg Sykes
Smug Homo sapiens have long looked down on Neanderthals, like city folk sneering at country cousins. Snort. You couldn’t even not go extinct. But these hominins have always gotten a bad rap, and Rebecca Wragg Sykes’s affectionate synthesis of a…
Jason Matthews
The last of the Dominika Egorova spy trilogy, finished as Matthews was dying. Russian intelligence has a mole of its own, in place for decades and about to be appointed to run the CIA, and double-agent Dominika is the only…
Lafcadio Hearn
Hearn was Greek-Irish, went to Japan in 1890 as a newspaper correspondent, married into a samurai family, took the name Koizumi Yakumo, and spent the rest of his life there. This is the collection he’s known for — Japanese ghost…
Mary Austin
Austin published this in 1903, out of years living in the Owens Valley between the Sierra and Death Valley, and it’s the book that taught American writers how to look at the desert. Short chapters: A buzzard, a scavenger’s territory,…
Robert Macfarlane
Macfarlane found that a children’s dictionary had cut words like acorn, bluebell, and kingfisher to make room for broadband and cut-and-paste, and this book is his answer. Nine chapters, each on a landscape and a writer who saw it clearly…
Kate Harris
Harris is one of the few authors whose writing stops me in my tracks (in a good way, of course). She grew up wanting to be an explorer, decided the planet was fully mapped, and went into science instead —…
Chi Zijian
A ninety-year-old Evenki woman, wife of this northern China clan’s last chieftain, tells the story of a century of her reindeer-herding people’s life to “the rain and the fire” over the course of a single day, as the last of…
Peter Heller
Ren Hopper is a park ranger in Yellowstone, still grieving the death of his wife, and his job is mostly managing tourists who get too close to the animals. His friend Hilly is a wolf biologist whom the anti-wolf faction…
Eric Blehm
Randy Morgenson spent twenty-eight summers as a backcountry ranger in Sequoia and Kings Canyon, walking a district most people never see, and in July 1996 he didn’t answer the radio. What followed was one of the largest searches in Park…
Bill Broyles
El Camino del Diablo runs across the driest corner of the Sonoran Desert, and for centuries the only reliable water on it was Tinajas Altas — a stack of natural rock basins in a granite ravine, filled by the rare…
Carl Hoffman
Two men, thirty years apart. Bruno Manser, a Swiss shepherd who walked into the Sarawak rainforest in 1984, lived six years with the nomadic Penan, then led their blockades against the logging companies and became a wanted man before vanishing…
