Brazilian thriller from 2016, first published in English by Celadon in August 2026. Four childhood friends leave rural Brazil for a shared apartment in Copacabana — students working part-time jobs, chasing the city and a future. When the rent jumps…
Cormac McCarthy
A runaway kid out of Tennessee, fourteen years old, drifts down into Texas in 1849 and falls in with the Glanton gang — real men, scalp hunters the Mexican states paid by the head to kill Apaches, who figured out…
Rae Giana Rashad
Set in an America where a second civil war broke out in 1954 and the wrong side won. By 2030, a white-run government called the Order classifies Black people as Descendants of Slavery and an algorithm hands out your job,…
Amy Bloom
Amy Bloom spent a career on literary novels and memoir, taught writing at Wesleyan, works as a psychotherapist, and decided to write a detective novel. An old professor at a fancy East Coast university gets bludgeoned in his office with…
Merritt R. Turetsky
Takes the most sneered-at ground on earth and contends it’s one of the planet’s great underrated systems. It leans hard on “liminal” and the closing pep talk is earnest to a fault, but it’s a great read anyway.
Robert Macfarlane and Jackie Morris
Forty-nine British birds, every one of them in decline, from avocet to yellowhammer. Macfarlane writes each as a short essay rather than an identification entry — habits, flight, song, myth, and threat — and he varies the form wildly, including…
Patrik Svensson
Who knew there could be an international bestseller all about eels? Turns out, as Patrik Svensson writes, quite a few knew. Centuries of leading thinkers — Pliny the Elder, Aristotle, Sigmund Freud, Rachel Carson — have been captivated by eels…
Thomas Elpel
No book is going to teach you botany in a day — you have to get down on your knees and go face to face with the flora. But this one gets you further in an afternoon than any field…
Michael Pollan
Four plants, four human desires, and the argument runs backward: The apple, the tulip, cannabis, and the potato didn’t get domesticated by us so much as they figured out what we wanted and got us to plant them everywhere. Sweetness…
Charles Cumming
BOX 88 is a black-ops outfit run jointly by the British and the Americans, so far off the books that neither MI6 nor the CIA is sure it exists. Cumming runs two clocks. In 1989, Lachlan Kite is eighteen, a…
Robin Wall Kimmerer
You’ve read it, right? Or seen it on the shelf? Or the bestseller list? How it got there is part of the story. Milkweed, a small nonprofit press in Minneapolis, published it in 2013 with no marketing budget, and for…
James Nestor
Nestor got himself into a Stanford lab and had a rhinologist plug both his nostrils shut with silicone for ten days, which left him breathing through his mouth and nothing else. His blood pressure spiked, he started snoring 4,000 percent…
Andrew H. Knoll
I can’t read much deep-time stuff before it puts me to sleep. I read this. Knoll is a Harvard paleontologist who built his career on the Precambrian, the three billion years of microbial life that came before anything you can…
Junot Diaz
Oscar de León is an overweight, lovelorn Dominican-American kid in New Jersey — a science fiction and fantasy obsessive who wants, more than anything, to fall in love. The book follows him but keeps widening out: to his sister, his…
Lev Grossman
I don’t know how I stumbled upon this book, because I mostly left my interest in fantasy behind in my teens (talkin’ to you, Tolkien). But, wow. I couldn’t put The Bright Sword down and even raved about it to…
Tana French
This is Tana French’s fourth Dublin Murder Squad book. Mick Kennedy, called Scorcher, is the squad’s top closer, a by-the-book man who believes hard work and rules keep the dark out. He catches a case at Brianstown, a half-finished housing…
Stephen Graham Jones
In 1912, a Lutheran pastor in Montana takes the confession of a Blackfeet man named Good Stab, who comes to the church weekly and tells his story in pieces. Good Stab is a vampire, made by a white creature he…
Zack Klein
Zach Klein co-founded Vimeo, then in 2010 bought fifty-five acres of woods in upstate New York with his wife and some friends and started building. They needed ideas, so they made a Tumblr to collect pictures of handmade cabins, and…
Jared D. Margulies
There’s a global black market in rare cacti and succulents, and Margulies spent years inside it — with collectors, growers, smugglers, customs officers, and conservation scientists across Europe, Asia, Mexico, and South Africa. Plants poached out of the ground in…
J. Smeaton Chase
J. Smeaton Chase was an Englishman who landed in Southern California in 1890, wandered it on horseback for thirty years, and wrote it down. This one came out in 1919, after he’d settled in Palm Springs when it was still…
Edmund C. Jaeger
Jaeger’s 1933 guide, and for decades it was the only real one: geology, water, weather, plants, animals, and the routes across the Mojave and the Colorado, written by a man who walked it for sixty years and taught at Riverside.…
Sarah Wynn-Williams
Wynn-Williams was a New Zealand diplomat who talked her way into a job at Facebook in 2011 because she believed the thing could do some good in the world. She stayed seven years running global public policy, in the room…
Donald D. Hoffman
Hoffman is a cognitive scientist who ran evolutionary simulations and got a result he didn’t like: Organisms that perceive reality accurately lose to organisms that perceive fitness payoffs instead. His conclusion is that space, time, and objects are a species-specific…
Peter Heller
Celine is sixty-eight, blue-blooded, a Sarah Lawrence grad, with an apartment under the Brooklyn Bridge, a cigarette habit that gave her emphysema, and a better record finding missing people than the FBI. She takes cases about lost families because of…
Stephen Lekson
Lekson noticed that Chaco Canyon, Aztec Ruins, and Paquimé in Chihuahua sit within a few minutes of longitude of one another, hundreds of miles apart, and built at different times from one another over four centuries. His premise is it…
