Why am I passionate about this?

I’m a nonfiction author whose success owes enormously to fiction. It challenges me to portray real people as vividly as characters in novels, and to use narrative and dialogue to keep readers turning the pages. Reading great novelists has taught me to obsessively seek exactly the right words, to fine-tune the cadence of each sentence, and to heed overall structural rhythm; continually, I return to the fount of fiction for language and inspiration. The astonishing novels I’ve shared here are among the most important books I’ve recently read to help grasp the critical times we’re living in. I’m confident you’ll feel the same.


I wrote

Book cover of The World Without Us

What is my book about?

How would the rest of nature fare if suddenly – never mind why – human beings vanished from Earth’s ecosystem?  How quickly…

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The books I picked & why

Book cover of The Overstory

Alan Weisman Why did I love this book?

For most of us writers, it’s hard enough to make people come to life on the page. In this Pulitzer Prize-winner, Powers manages to turn trees into memorable characters. A literary tour-de-force, The Overstory exemplifies why nonfiction authors like me, charged with conveying critical information to readers, study the story-telling alchemy of novelists. Recalling Picasso’s observation that art is a lie that gives us the truth, this deeply researched work of fiction reminds us that failing to respect our biological companions on this Earth, as our early ancestors did, risks not only losing them, but ourselves. Even though I’ve written about the environment for decades, after reading it, I’ll never again feel the same about forests and trees again. The Overstory doesn’t merely inform, it transforms.

By Richard Powers,

Why should I read it?

35 authors picked The Overstory as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

The Overstory, winner of the 2019 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction, is a sweeping, impassioned work of activism and resistance that is also a stunning evocation of-and paean to-the natural world. From the roots to the crown and back to the seeds, Richard Powers's twelfth novel unfolds in concentric rings of interlocking fables that range from antebellum New York to the late twentieth-century Timber Wars of the Pacific Northwest and beyond. There is a world alongside ours-vast, slow, interconnected, resourceful, magnificently inventive, and almost invisible to us. This is the story of a handful of people who learn how to see…


Book cover of The Ministry for the Future

Alan Weisman Why did I love this book?

In a century that often feels so unreal, it’s fitting that one of the best novelists of our times is a science fiction author. For decades, Kim Stanley Robinson has been writing otherworldly parables, but this book stays right here on Earth, offering a brilliant and detailed blueprint for how to literally turn down the heat before it’s too late. A vast thinker and consummate researcher who seems to overlook nothing, this immensely readable yarn makes you — and me — believe there’s a chance, after all. The Ministry for the Future may well be the defining book of the 21st century. Let’s hope so. 

By Kim Stanley Robinson,

Why should I read it?

24 authors picked The Ministry for the Future as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

ONE OF BARACK OBAMA’S FAVORITE BOOKS OF THE YEAR

“The best science-fiction nonfiction novel I’ve ever read.” —Jonathan Lethem
 
"If I could get policymakers, and citizens, everywhere to read just one book this year, it would be Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future." —Ezra Klein (Vox)

The Ministry for the Future is a masterpiece of the imagination, using fictional eyewitness accounts to tell the story of how climate change will affect us all. Its setting is not a desolate, postapocalyptic world, but a future that is almost upon us. Chosen by Barack Obama as one of his favorite…


Book cover of Sea of Poppies

Alan Weisman Why did I love this book?

In his impossible-to-put-down Ibis Trilogy (Sea of Poppies, River of Smoke, Flood of Fire) Amitav Ghosh uses an obscure historical event most of us have barely heard of, the Opium Wars, to explain the rise — and maybe inevitable fall — of global capitalism. Ghosh both exploded and expanded my appreciation of English’s richness with characters speaking in multiple dialects, yet written with such lucidity that I never had to tear myself away from the mesmerizing plot to consult the glossary (itself fascinating). By the end, the Ibis Trilogy’s vast pageantry turned out to be about far more than I realized. Reading it provides one of those aha! moments when you suddenly realize how the world works — and you’ll wish everyone else would read it, too. Everybody thanks me for recommending it.

By Amitav Ghosh,

Why should I read it?

7 authors picked Sea of Poppies as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

At the heart of this epic saga, set just before the Opium Wars, is an old slaving-ship, The Ibis. Its destiny is a tumultuous voyage across the Indian Ocean, its crew a motley array of sailors and stowaways, coolies and convicts. In a time of colonial upheaval, fate has thrown together a truly diverse cast of Indians and Westerners, from a bankrupt Raja to a widowed villager, from an evangelical English opium trader to a mulatto American freedman. As their old family ties are washed away they, like their historical counterparts, come to view themselves as jahaj-bhais or ship-brothers. An…


Book cover of The Trees

Alan Weisman Why did I love this book?

I hesitate to describe The Trees — in fact, I recommend you avoid reading any reviews, or even the back cover, because the book is so full of surprises that it would be a sin to spoil any of them. I’ll only say that of all the recent books dealing with the intractable shame of racial struggles, this is my favorite, hands-down. Prepare yourself to be alternately sick with laughter or sick with horror — which is exactly the experience of the protagonists, and of their real-life compatriots. Afterward, like me, you’ll want to read everything else Percival Everett has written.

By Percival L. Everett,

Why should I read it?

2 authors picked The Trees as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

An uncanny literary thriller addressing the painful legacy of lynching in the US, by the author of Telephone

Percival Everett's The Trees is a page-turner that opens with a series of brutal murders in the rural town of Money, Mississippi. When a pair of detectives from the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation arrive, they meet expected resistance from the local sheriff, his deputy, the coroner, and a string of racist White townsfolk. The murders present a puzzle, for at each crime scene there is a second dead body: that of a man who resembles Emmett Till.

The detectives suspect that these…


Book cover of The President's Gardens

Alan Weisman Why did I love this book?

I’ve just returned from a research trip to Iraq (one of many settings for my next book: stay tuned). I took along two Iraqi novels, The President's Gardens and Daughter of the Tigris (they’re really just one; the first literally ends with the words to be continued) and I was as stirred by reading them as by what I saw there. While we protest Russia’s outrageous rape of Ukraine, we forget the hideous mess that America’s unjustifiable invasion left in Iraq. Even under Saddam Hussein, Iraq was considered the flower of Arab culture, a land overflowing with poetry, music, and art. Today much of it is rubble. Masterfully, Al-Ramli describes the latter with all the breathtaking beauty of the former. This ranks among my most moving reading experiences ever.

By Muhsin Al-Ramli, Luke Leafgren (translator),

Why should I read it?

1 author picked The President's Gardens as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

One Hundred Years of Solitude meets The Kite Runner in Saddam Hussein's Iraq.

"A contemporary tragedy of epic proportions. No author is better placed than Muhsin Al-Ramli, already a star in the Arabic literary scene, to tell this story. I read it in one sitting".
Hassan Blasim, winner of the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize for The Iraqi Christ.

On the third day of Ramadan, the village wakes to find the severed heads of nine of its sons stacked in banana crates by the bus stop.

One of them belonged to one of the most wanted men in Iraq, known to…


Explore my book 😀

Book cover of The World Without Us

What is my book about?

How would the rest of nature fare if suddenly – never mind why – human beings vanished from Earth’s ecosystem?  How quickly could nature invade our vacated spaces, dismantle our infrastructure and architecture, refill empty niches, and heal the scars we’ve inflicted on this lovely planet? Would endangered species, relieved of our constant daily pressures, suddenly rebound? What about everything we’d leave behind – could nature eventually eliminate all our traces, or are some things we've created so permanent they're indestructible? Which human artifacts would last the longest?

These captivating questions, designed to seduce readers into thinking about the environment while there’s still time to save it and ourselves, made this book’s original edition an international bestseller, now in 35 languages. See for yourself why, in this 15th-anniversary edition with a new afterword.

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No Average Day: The 24 Hours of October 24, 1944

By Rona Simmons,

Book cover of No Average Day: The 24 Hours of October 24, 1944

Rona Simmons Author Of No Average Day: The 24 Hours of October 24, 1944

New book alert!

Why am I passionate about this?

I come by my interest in history and the years before, during, and after the Second World War honestly. For one thing, both my father and my father-in-law served as pilots in the war, my father a P-38 pilot in North Africa and my father-in-law a B-17 bomber pilot in England. Their histories connect me with a period I think we can still almost reach with our fingertips and one that has had a momentous impact on our lives today. I have taken that interest and passion to discover and write true life stories of the war—focusing on the untold and unheard stories often of the “Average Joe.”

Rona's book list on World War II featuring the average Joe

What is my book about?

October 24, 1944, is not a day of national remembrance. Yet, more Americans serving in World War II perished on that day than on any other single day of the war.

The narrative of No Average Day proceeds hour by hour and incident by incident while focusing its attention on ordinary individuals—clerks, radio operators, cooks, sailors, machinist mates, riflemen, and pilots and their air crews. All were men who chose to serve their country and soon found themselves in a terrifying and otherworldly place.

No Average Day reveals the vastness of the war as it reaches past the beaches in…

No Average Day: The 24 Hours of October 24, 1944

By Rona Simmons,

What is this book about?

October 24, 1944, is not a day of national remembrance. Yet, more Americans serving in World War II perished on that day than on December 7, 1941, when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, or on June 6, 1944, when the Allies stormed the beaches of Normandy, or on any other single day of the war. In its telling of the events of October 24, No Average Day proceeds hour by hour and incident by incident. The book begins with Army Private First-Class Paul Miller's pre-dawn demise in the Sendai #6B Japanese prisoner of war camp. It concludes with the death…


5 book lists we think you will like!

Interested in the United Nations, trees, and Mississippi?

Trees 52 books
Mississippi 88 books