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’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 …
Crimes against man and nature collide in Waiting for the Night Song, a vivid and compelling environmental thriller by Julie Carrick Dalton. Dalton is a journalist, writer, and frequent speaker on the topic of writing fiction in the age of climate crisis, an area of expertise that shines through in her debut novel. Cadie Kessler …
Véronique Tadjo’s slender, haunting novel In the Company of Men offers myriad points of view—human and nonhuman—in its story of the Ebola epidemic in West Africa in 2014. Published in French in 2017 and in English in 2021, it’s a timely novel that makes important connections, revealing the devastating impact of how humans treat the …
Ann Kidd Taylor’s novel, The Shark Club, is not only a delightful read as we head into spring and summer “beach reading” time, but it is a much-needed antidote to Peter Benchley’s Jaws. Rather than instill fear in readers, The Shark Club highlights the importance of these four-hundred-million-year-old creatures to our ecosystem and debunks the myths that other books …
I’m not sure how I heard about this novel, only that I had heard that there was an animal rights element to it. Yet in the early pages I struggled to find that element. This is a novel set in 1913 on a British estate in which a group of upper-class couples have gathered to …
In Tender is the Flesh, Agustina Bazterrica expertly crafts a horrifying reality that feels too contemporary to be the future. A virus has decimated the world’s animal population. Societies around the globe, rather than shifting to vegetarianism, continue to demand meat at alarming costs. Governments have legalized cannibalism (which has the added benefits of curbing …
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 …
Migrations is a stunningly beautiful novel about a woman who has always been running—from her childhood, her mistakes, her memories—and this time, she’s traveling from Greenland to Antarctica, following the world’s last flock of Arctic terns on their final migration. As the novel opens, Franny Stone approaches the captain of the only boat who might …
While the title of Becky Mandelbaum’s The Bright Side Sanctuary for Animals may indicate this is a novel about animals, it is very much more a human novel. Set primarily in a small, conservative town in St. Clare, Kansas, just after the 2016 election, the book focuses mainly on two characters: Mona, a sanctuary owner …
Sadly, we cannot review everything we receive here at EcoLit Books — but I did want to highlight a few new and newly republished works… The Lives and Deaths of Shelter Animalsby Katy M. GuentherStanford University Press For the Birds: Protecting Wildlife through the Naturalist Gazeby Elizabeth CherryRutgers University Press Butterfly: Poems by Miriam Sorrel …
Eco-tourism has become increasingly popular in recent years, travel intended to help conserve and contribute to remote communities and delicate ecosystems, but…disaster tourism? We’re all familiar with rubbernecking drivers, and South Korean novelist Yun Ko-Eun escalates our morbid curiosity with catastrophe into a full-blown industry in The Disaster Tourist. This is Yun’s second novel to …
It’s rare to find a novel whose plot centers around animal rescue, and rarer still to encounter one that is deftly written and gets it (mostly) right—which is among the many reasons Deb Olin Unferth’s Barn 8 is both a terrific and important book. Barn 8 is not necessarily an animal-rights novel—the animals themselves come second to many …
Published in 1969, The Edible Woman is Margaret Atwood’s first novel. As a vegan, I was curious to read this book because it features a protagonist, Marian, who discovers one day that she can no longer eat meat. While at a fancy restaurant with her fiancé… She looked down at her own half-eaten steak and …
Olga Tokarczuk’s Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead resists easy categorization. It is a dark comedy, murder mystery, treatise on animal rights, and tribute to English poet William Blake. It is also a feminist portrait of a woman taking stock of the social and cultural values that have shaped all that she …
