Greta is forty-six, broke, and living in a half-ruined Dutch farmhouse in Hudson, New York, with a beekeeper and a bunch of bees in the walls. She has a job transcribing the sessions of a local sex-and-relationship coach, which means…
Dan Flores
This is sixty-six million years of American animals in one book. Flores starts after the asteroid that killed the dinos and works forward — the strange menagerie that evolved, then the arrival of humans and the extinction of mammoths, horses,…
Craig Childs
Eighty percent of Americans can’t see the Milky Way from home. Childs goes looking for what’s left of the actual night — sleeping out in the desert without a light, tracking how animals use darkness, sitting with astronomers and with…
Charlotte McConaghy
Set on a fictional and very, very remote island at the bottom of the world, Charlotte McConaghy’s third novel brings new meaning to Southern gothic: There are dark and stormy nights, melodrama, and a ruddy lighthouse keeper, but whales and…
Matthew B. Crawford
Matthew Crawford devotes Why We Drive to an anonymous couple he sees running down a wooded trail, pretending they’re riding motorcycles, making vrooming noises and playfully leaping over roots. It’s this eye for the small but uniquely human details that…
Jardine Libaire
It’s New Haven, Connecticut, in 1986. Elise Perez is twenty, mixed race, out of the projects, squatting in the house next door to a Yale senior named Jamey Hyde, who has an heir’s trust fund and a family that will…
David Werner
Okay, I do a little prepping and this book is part of it. It’s a village health care manual, first published in 1970 out of work in the Sierra Madre of Mexico, and still the most widely used health book…
Murray Dickson
Okay, I do a little prepping and this book is part of it. Published by the Hesperian Foundation, the outfit behind Where There Is No Doctor, and written for health workers and villagers with no dentist within a day’s travel.…
Benjamín Labatut
Five linked pieces that start as history and slide into fiction without telling you where the line is. Fritz Haber pulls nitrogen out of the air, feeds the world, and invents chemical weapons. Schwarzschild solves Einstein’s equations in the trenches…
Suzanne Simard
Suzanne Simard’s When the Forest Breathes indicts modern logging practices as starkly as Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring indicted pesticide use. Her research in British Columbia forests shows that logging machines devastate the forest floor and carbon stored there. In a…
Ian McEwan
The year is 2119, most of Britain is under water and reduced to an archipelago, and an academic named Thomas Metcalfe has built his career on a lost poem — read aloud once at a dinner party in 2014, never…
David Allen Sibley
Sibley drew the definitive field guides, and this is the opposite of a field guide: A big book of large paintings with the answers to the questions people actually ask. Why do birds stand on one leg. How they sleep…
Jennifer Ackerman
Owls are hard to study — night, silence, no interest in being watched — so most of what people believed about them was folklore. Ackerman goes out with the researchers finally cracking it. Feathers with a comb on the leading…
Daniel Kraus
Jay Gardiner is seventeen and diving alone off the California coast to recover his father’s remains — the father was a legendary diver who walked into the ocean to die of cancer, and the two of them had said unforgivable…
Patrick Syme
Before color charts, naturalists had no shared vocabulary, so a German mineralogist named Abraham Werner built one and the Scottish painter Patrick Syme expanded it in 1814 — 110 colors, each with a hand-painted swatch and three references: A mineral,…
Julian Brave NoiseCat
NoiseCat’s father, a Secwépemc and St’at’imc carver, left when he was young, and NoiseCat grew up with his non-Native mother in the urban Native community in Oakland, spending time on the Canim Lake reserve in British Columbia. The book is…
Meg Little Reilly
Ash and Pia leave Brooklyn for rural Vermont wanting a simpler life, and then the forecasts start describing a superstorm months out — big enough that the government begins issuing guidance and the town begins picking sides. Pia throws herself…
M.R. O’Connor
“I had forgotten that my phone knew nothing of whether humans can fly, or the seasonal flow of the Rio Grande, that it had no actual experience because it had never been born, only programmed by someone who might never…
Mark Boyle
Irishman Mark Boyle does nothing halfway. Exhausted by industrialized, well, everything, he lived without using money for three years. Craving an even more elemental life, he bought land near Knockmoyle, hand-built a cabin, and spent a year with no modern…
Nicholas Triolo
This is a book about walking in circles, and the obvious question is “why would you walk in circles?” The answer, in the deeply considered view of author Nicholas Triolo, is profound: because it will change your relationship with the…
Kim McCoy
What The Joy of Cooking is to home cooks, Waves and Beaches has been to sea lovers for nearly sixty years. The comprehensive tome is part fundamental instructional and part voluminous love letter to the alchemy of where land meets…
Roger Deakin
You’ll never regret plunging into the “wild swimming” world of British environmentalist Roger Deakin, who lived in a moated farmhouse. Yes, a moat. You’re already charmed, right? Inspired by a short story, Deakin decided to swim throughout Britain in as…
Paolo Bacigalupi
The Colorado River has been cut down to nothing and the states have gone to war over what’s left, legally and otherwise. Nevada has water knives — Angel Velasquez is one — men who show up with a court order…
Rebecca Solnit
This is walking as a subject with a history. Solnit runs from bipedalism through the peripatetic philosophers, the invention of the country walk as recreation, Wordsworth and the Romantics, pilgrimage, the labyrinth, mountaineering, the flâneur, protest marches and the Suffragettes,…
John Lanchester
Sea level rose, and Britain has ringed the entire island in concrete. Every citizen serves two years as a Defender on the wall, twelve-hour shifts staring at cold water, and the rule is simple: If Others get past you, you…
