My seven novels all celebrate the natural world—while, I hope, telling a good story. Nature has always been my solace and delight. I’ve also had the honor of developing and directing an MFA in Nature Writing at Western Colorado University, one of the few nationwide programs to focus on cutting-edge environmental writing. While I mainly write novels, I’m the author of two nonfiction books and one play and the editor of three environmental anthologies. When not writing or teaching, I can be found sauntering around the West, especially in my home state of Colorado. I love travel and adventuring, and I like looking at birds, stars, clouds, and sea glass.
I’m on a mission to dispel the notion that nature-loving books are dark and depressing. This is my favorite example of a delightful novel that seriously celebrates the planet and gives us a compelling story.
The novel takes place in an aquarium, and although the main characters are humans, parts of the book are narrated by a giant Pacific octopus living there. Not only is he hilarious and an escape artist, but he also forms a deep friendship with the protagonist, ultimately changing her life.
After reading this book, I think readers will love the octopi (and all sea life) all the more.
THE INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
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'Full of heart and humour . . . I loved it.' Ruth Hogan
'Will stay with you for a long time.' Anstey Harris
'I defy you to put it down once you've started' Cynthia D'Aprix Sweeney
After Tova Sullivan's husband died, she began working the night cleaner shift at the Sowell Bay Aquarium. Ever since her eighteen-year-old son, Erik, mysteriously vanished on a boat over thirty years ago keeping busy has helped her cope. One night she meets Marcellus, a giant Pacific octopus living at the aquarium who…
I direct an MFA in Nature Writing, and something by Barbara Kingsolver is always on my syllabus. This gorgeous novel is perhaps my longest-standing favorite, though. It takes place in Appalachia and is full of that area's natural history.
On top of that, the main character is a wildlife biologist—so there’s plenty to learn from her! There’s an exciting plot, and lots of love stories (I do like a good love story), but what I love most is the underlying ethic of good living on planet Earth.
It is summer in the Appalachian mountains and love, desire and attraction are in the air. Nature, too, it seems, is not immune. From her outpost in an isolated mountain cabin, Deanna Wolfe, a reclusive wildlife biologist, watches a den of coyotes that have recently migrated into the region. She is caught off guard by a young hunter who invades her most private spaces and interrupts her self-assured, solitary life. On a farm several miles down the mountain, Lusa Maluf Landowski, a bookish city girl turned farmer's wife, finds herself marooned in a strange place where she must declare or…
The Model Spy is based on the true story of Toto Koopman, who spied for the Allies and Italian Resistance during World War II.
Largely unknown today, Toto was arguably the first woman to spy for the British Intelligence Service. Operating in the hotbed of Mussolini's Italy, she courted danger…
Memoirs can be delightful, too, although they also have a bad rap for being depressing! This is one of my favorite Earth-based recent nonfiction reads. It focuses on the joys of gardening—even in a small suburban plot—and focuses on being a black gardener in a predominately white town.
The plants she grows are used as a metaphor to discuss cultural diversity, particularly in how we must cultivate diverse and intersectional language to protect our planet. Dungy is also the editor of an anthology entitled Black Nature, which covers decades of poetry by Black writers.
A seminal work that expands how we talk about the natural world and the environment as National Book Critics Circle Criticism finalist Camille T. Dungy diversifies her garden to reflect her heritage.
In Soil: The Story of a Black Mother’s Garden, poet and scholar Camille T. Dungy recounts the seven-year odyssey to diversify her garden in the predominately white community of Fort Collins, Colorado. When she moved there in 2013, with her husband and daughter, the community held strict restrictions about what residents could and could not plant in their gardens.
In resistance to the homogenous policies that limited the…
Another of my favorite authors, Erdrich, also has a big social and environmental justice theme throughout her works. There’s a delightful premise—a ghost haunts a bookstore in Minneapolis, and a mystery must be solved!—but it also takes on very serious subjects.
Set in 2019-2020, it covers the race riots, pandemic stress, and social justice issues. One thing I love is a book that has a seriousness of purpose but is still truly joyful and fun to read.
In this stunning and timely novel, Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award-winning author Louise Erdrich creates a wickedly funny ghost story, a tale of passion, of a complex marriage and of a woman's relentless errors.
Louise Erdrich's latest novel, The Sentence, asks what we owe to the living, the dead, to the reader and to the book. A small independent bookstore in Minneapolis is haunted from November 2019 to November 2020 by the store's most annoying customer. Flora dies on All Souls' Day, but…
Odette Lefebvre is a serial killer stalking the shadows of Nazi-occupied Paris and must confront both the evils of those she murders and the darkness of her own past. In Douglas Weissman's "Girl in the Ashes," this young woman's childhood trauma shapes her complex journey through World War II France,…
One house, many generations. This novel takes place in one house in New England over the course of many decades—and wow, does it celebrate the planet! From Puritan times to now, and with many inhabitants, the story takes us on a delightful journey across time...in one very precise space.
It’s very much about ongoing connection to (and care for) our flora and fauna. Each chapter reminds me how we are connected to our landscape, no matter when we were born. For example, a generation before and after me will still love one particular tree. Where we live is something worth celebrating.
A sweeping novel about a single house in the woods of New England, told through the lives of those who inhabit it across the centuries—“a time-spanning, genre-blurring work of storytelling magic” (The Washington Post) from the Pulitzer Prize finalist and author of The Piano Tuner and The Winter Soldier.
“With the expansiveness and immersive feeling of two-time Booker Prize nominee David Mitchell’s fiction (Cloud Atlas), the wicked creepiness of Edgar Allan Poe, and Mason’s bone-deep knowledge of and appreciation for the natural world that’s on par with that of Thoreau, North Woods fires on all cylinders.”—San Francisco Chronicle
Ammalie Brinks has just lost the three keys to her life’s purpose—her husband, job, and mom-ing role. She’s also mystified to find herself in middle age—how exactly had that happened? The idea of becoming irrelevant, invisible, of letting her life vaguely slip away—well, the terror of that has her driving through Nebraska with a fork in her hair. What she does have is this: Three literal keys. Keys to empty homes she plans on breaking into.
She seeks to find a life truly her own. And as someone breaking the law, she finds there’s a real benefit to being invisible, which she uses to her advantage—until she becomes the striking, bold, and very much manifested self she wants to be.
This mystery involves amateur sleuth Zora Harrison who reopens a cold case concerning the disappearance of an old friend and colleague, Jane Hubbard. Jane was swindled by a broker who feared her testimony, but there are other suspects as well, including a jealous rival.
1848. Ireland is starving in the middle of the Potato Famine. For many there seems to be only two choices – stay and die, or leave and survive. Families split up. A young potato-farming couple, Pat and Caitlin, evicted from their home in Mayo, decide to seek their fortunes beyond…
