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Based mostly on his own experiences, Theophile Maher’s local color novel Cannel Coal Oil Days challenges many popular ideas about antebellum Appalachia, bringing it more fully into the broader story of the United States. Written in 1887, discovered in 2018, and published here for the first time, it offers a narrative of life between 1859 and 1861 in what was then western Virginia as it became West Virginia.

Cannel coal (a soft form of coal whose oil, when distilled, was competitive in the lighting oil business after overfishing reduced the whale oil supply) was at the center of one of Appalachia’s first extractive industries. Using the development of coal oil manufacturing in the Kanawha valley as its launching point, Maher’s semiautobiographical novel tells of a series of interrelated changes, each reflecting larger transformations in the United States as a whole. It shows how coal oil manufacturing was transformed from an amateurish endeavor to a more professional industry, with implications for Appalachian environment and labor. Then, Maher foreshadows the coming Progressive Era by insisting on moral and environmental reforms based in democratic and Christian principles. Finally, he tells the story of the coming of the Civil War to the region, as the novel’s protagonist, a mining engineer, works closely with a Black family to organize the local abolitionist mountain folk into a Union militia to aid in the secession of West Virginia from Virginia.

An experimental narrative by eco-fiction author and poet Patrick Lawler evolves out of the interactions between twenty-four extinct animals and those characters who struggle for significance in the face of their own extinction.

Patrick Lawler’s second novel, Conversations with Extinct Animal, is a dialogue between psychology and ecology—between poetry and story. A suicide note masquerading as a love letter, the novel transcends genres and keeps kaleidoscopically shifting: sometimes it is an elegy, and sometimes it is a therapy session—but always these are the field notes for the end of the world.

As a collection of characters associated with The Facility come to terms with an individual’s death, they must confront their own losses amid the colossal absence of the twenty-four extinct animals. All the characters float between various inexplicable, mystifying “syndromes” that call into question their identities and, ultimately, call into question the elements of story itself. “Looking at pictures of the Extinct Animals, I can’t help but wonder if it is too late to save the world—especially since there are so many different worlds,” observes the narrator of the novel in his efforts to save the unsavable.

In John B. Wright’s debut environmental mystery, Matt Solberg is charged with discovering who is lighting fires in the forests that surround Missoula, Montana. A geographer with a deep personal need to bring people out of danger, Matt leads a search and rescue team whose job is to head directly into the mouth of hell, hiking into blazing backcountry to find missing residents. Matt and his team not only rely on their hard-won knowledge of Montana’s wild landscape, but also on Matt’s mentor, Dr. Bill Knight, a fire ecologist who understands the burning beast better than anyone.
 
When a suspicious fire destroys the mansion of a movie star, Matt must hike in to find his missing daughter and save her from the chaos. Then fires begin to explode everywhere as climate change drives temperatures over 100 degrees and rain refuses to fall, threatening thousands of homes. Who is setting these fires? Is it the Montana Tree Monkeys, an eco-radical group determined to scare off the newcomers? Or is it a retired smokejumper with an axe to grind about the encroaching mansions? Could it be Paladin, a shadowy figure leaving strange clues around the state? It’s Matt’s mission to find answers to these questions during a summer of heat, smoke, and unimaginable loss. Weaving together gripping drama and intriguing fire science, Fire Scars reveals the physical and psychological wounds we all carry—and the power we have to overcome.
 
 

A tale of two sisters braving the current of global tremors, mysterious beings, and their own past

Amihan is a respected and talented wildlife researcher on a small Pacific island in the US Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, where the land has undergone centuries of occupation. Offshore military testing, shifting climates, and tourists threaten the local ecosystem, making Amihan’s job harder than ever. As she braves knotty forests and watery caves in search of the elusive rufous fantail, her expedition takes her to the suicide cliffs . . . and over them. Amihan plummets into another realm, a purgatory of colonial violence and Filipino folklore.

Ligaya, Amihan’s sister, is back in Osaka and in between research positions when she is called to the island to search for her itinerant and reclusive sister. But when her search uncovers a stowaway, Ligaya's path takes an unexpected turn. Traveling along with her is a ghost with an omikuji tongue—a ghost that delights in spitting fortunes and mining memories. As Ligaya searches and Amihan wanders, it becomes clear that there is more to confront between these sisters than their whereabouts. On an island shuddering under the weight of global crises, can Ligaya make it to Amihan, or has her sister wandered too far?

Eclectic, experimental, and wildly imaginative climate fictions from a familiar world hauntingly transformed

Climate disaster–induced fugue states, mutinous polar bears, support groups for recently displaced millionaires, men who hear trees, and women who lose their wives on environmental refugee resettlement trips. In these dispatches from a weirding world, the absurd and fantastic are increasingly indistinguishable from reality. Exploring this liminal moment, Ashley Shelby’s collection of climate fictions imagines a near future that is both unnervingly familiar and subversively strange.

Set in the same post-climate-impact era, these stories range from playfully satirical to poignantly humane, bending traditional narrative forms and coming together into a brilliant and unusual contemplation of our changing world. Featuring the Hugo-nominated novelette “Muri,” Honeymoons in Temporary Locations processes the unthinkable through riotous inventions like guided tours of submerged cities, Craigslist ads placed by climate refugees, and cynical pharmaceutical efforts to market a drug to treat solastalgia, the existential distress caused by environmental change.

Shelby reengineers the dystopic bleakness that characterizes so much climate fiction by embracing an eclectic experimentalism leavened with humor, irony, and the inevitable bathos that characterizes the human experience. Unexpected and clever, this innovative collection confirms her status as a visionary writer whose work expands the forms, attitudes, and possibilities of climate fiction.

In the fall of 2018, a bomb goes off at a water-bottling plant in the mountains of southwest Virginia, an incident the FBI declares an act of ecoterrorism. Arrested at the scene is Chris Bright, a mountain hermit with a long history of activism. Unaccounted for—and presumed dead—is Mara Wood, an installation artist who in the last two years has lost her son and left her husband.

But Mara’s estranged husband David cannot quite believe she is dead, and as he goes about reconstructing the story of what happened, he begins to imagine an alternate narrative—one in which their son doesn’t die and his wife doesn’t leave him, one in which his wife doesn’t carry on a secret relationship with Chris Bright, a man bent on fighting back against the environmental despoliation of his Appalachian home. Lioness is a page-turning, heart-wrenching examination of extremism: What pushes people to act violently, and is that violence ever justified?

A mysterious death, a techno-dystopian backdrop, a crumbling climate. A young woman searches for answers in this meditative, lyrical thriller.

In 2060 Orlando, FL, the state’s corruption festers amid unpredictable storms and climate upheaval, plunging society into a desperate eat the rich struggle for survival. As the world crumbles around her, 23-year-old Savannah fights to secure the bare essentials—drinkable water, dwindling food rations, and coveted orange juice. With only her father to rely on, Savannah navigates a world where tech reigns over humanity; and healthcare, climate-controlled housing, and life-saving news alerts are a privilege for the wealthy elite. Everything changes the day she stumbles upon her late sister's journal. Grief morphs into determination as she learns about her sister’s involvement in a pharmaceutical project that could revolutionize medicine for all.

Armed with this knowledge, Savannah holds the key to completing her sister's work. Will she have the courage to do so? Or will fear and despair shackle her to a fate worse than death?
 

A New York TimesBook Review Editors’ Choice

A Shelf Awareness Best Book of the Year

Hudson Booksellers Book of the Year

One of the New York Post’s Best Books of the Summer

One of The Millions’s Most Anticipated Books of the Year

IndieNext Pick

A Time Magazine “What to Read Now” Selection

A wry novel set at the edge of the earth about the courage it takes to band together, even as everything around you falls apart

Unmoored by a recent family tragedy, Cooper Gosling is adrift at thirty and on the verge of ruining her career. So when the opportunity arises to join the National Science Foundation’s Artists & Writers Program in Antarctica, she jumps at the chance—and finds herself in the company of others who are just abnormal enough for Polar life, a group of eccentrics motivated by desires as ambiguous as her own. When they are joined by a fringe scientist who claims climate change is a hoax, the Polies’ already-imbalanced community is rattled, bringing them to the center of a global controversy and threatening the ancient ice chip they call home.

Asks who gets the right to call themselves a good person in a morally bankrupt world 

In The Flat Woman, women exclusively are blamed for the climate crisis. Seagulls drop dead from the sky, and the government, instead of taking responsibility, scapegoats a group of female ecoterrorists. When a girl’s mother is incarcerated for climate crimes, she is forced to raise herself alone. As a young woman, she begins a romance with an environmental activist whose passion makes her question her own role in the world. By turns hilarious, deadly serious, and completely absurd, The Flat Woman asks who gets the right to call themselves a good person in a world ripe with disaster. 

Driven by complex academic and moral questions, The Flat Woman is certain to appeal to fans of feminist and experimental literature, as well as fans of Margaret Atwood, Renee Gladman, Bhanu Kapil, Maggie Nelson, Kelly Link, and Anne Carson.