Discover Your Next Favorite Read: Top New(ish) Book Recommendations

The Wayfinder by Adam Johnson Farrar, Straus and Giroux Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Orphan Master’s Son, Adam Johnson, brings forth another imaginative epic, this time set in the island kingdom of Tonga, a shifting society on the verge of collapse. Queue young Kōrero’s make-or-break seafaring adventure. See this wayfinding heroine, buoyed by lively lyrical prose, navigate by star and current, tell tales, and even talk to corpses in this wild, captivating new classic. Winter by Val McDermid Atlantic Monthly Press “I’ve always had a soft spot for Winter,” McDermid, the Scottish “tartan noir” crime writer tells us. The distractions of spring, the glamour of summer, the melancholy splendor of autumn — all well and good. But she prefers the season “tinged with the longing for warmth and light and escape … a chance to envelop myself in merino layers … to snuggle indoors without guilt.” In a pattern that’s served her across some forty novels, McDermid starts a new book in those days of scant sunlight, revelling in the shadows, pencils sharpened and Nordic music for a soundtrack, a mug or coffee or “a wee whiskey to hand,” aiming for fifty fresh pages by February. In this warm collection of essays, bits of history, memoir, and meditations — on solstice and soup, good books, hungry birds and bonfires — she encourages us all to “raise a glass to the joys of winter.” Goethe’s Oak: A Holocaust Story by John Price Ice Cube Press During a visit to Buchenwald Memorial in Germany, Price became captivated by a large tree stump covered in small memorial stones. Goethe Eirche, it read. Goethe’s Oak. Subsequent research led to this slim meditation on loss, time, and remembrance, in which the author imagines the mind of this magnificent tree who supported neighboring saplings, offered inspiration to artists and comfort to prisoners, and witnessed some of humankind’s worst atrocities. You can revisit the essay where Price first wrote about Goethe’s tree here. Raising Hare by Chole Dalton Patheon After rescuing a leveret (biologist speak for baby hare) from a roving dog, Dalton, against all odds, manages to keep the young animal alive with bottle-feedings, dried oats, and warm beds by the hearth. Here she chronicles the wonders and peculiarities of cohabiting with a companionable yet still wild and autonomous creature. I confess, I love hares, and solitude, and looking out at the rain, and in that sense this book seems tailormade for me. But, if you’re feeling like you could use some more quiet tenderness in your life and reading (who doesn’t these days?), try this tender meditation on freedom, trust, and forging a more meaningful relationship with the more-than-human world, on its terms, one animal at a time. Field Guide to the Woody Plants of the Northern Forests by Jerry Jenkins Cornell University Press Jerry Jenkins is on the short list of the most interesting people I know. He’s a world-class botanist, but has elected to spend his life outside of the academic world where he could easily have made a secure home. Instead, he’s tromped the woods, mountains, and bogs of the northeast, along the way accumulating an unmatched understanding of how this place works. Here’s what’s truly amazing, though: he’s also extended that understanding to the human communities that surround the wild places. His Adirondack Atlas is one of the most remarkable books I know, a collection of maps he drafted to explain everything from the region’s military history to its supply of hospital beds and rural clinics. There were a few hardcore taxonomists impatient with his excursions – they’ve been waiting a lifetime for his flora of the region, and now they have it, as beautiful as anyone could ask for. But more beautiful because it comes from someone who understands the context – the whole context – of the various parts. – Bill McKibben Daughter of Mother-of-Pearl by Mandy-Suzanne Wong Graywolf Press For all mollusks and inhabitants of water and for the waters of Earth. So reads the apt dedication of this gentle linked essay collection devoted to snails, squid, sea stars, jellyfish and other wobbly aquatic creatures. In essay, fragment, photo, and collage, Wong’s investigations undulate, beckoning an embrace of the unknowable, and with it a call to better coexistence. Governing Bodies by Sangamithra Iyer Milkweed Press In her Whiting Award-winning memoir, civil engineer and immigrants’ daughter Sangamithra Iyer offers a subtle but passionate exploration into family, ecology, personal and planetary grief, and the legacies of colonialism, capitalism, and speciesism. In braiding the story of her freedom-fighting grandfather with her own experiences as an activist and engineer, Iyer meanders, like a river, with purpose and grace. Beyond Tomorrow: Planning a new civilization by Christopher Nye Wipf and Stock Publishers Orion cofounder and emeritus Chris Nye has devoted much of his life to pursuing a dogged, hopeful determination to make the world a better place. He believes a dynamic, holistic, on-going education (body, brain, and soul) nurtured from childhood through elderdom can spark the kind of morally responsible, creative, and collaborative thinking required for earnest changemaking on any scale – from families, farms, and neighborhoods to unions, cities, and even civilization itself. At a time often dominated by doomscrolling and despair, Nye empowers the individual to think differently, get in the game, and treat hope as both responsibility and action plan. Invisible Exile: The Travel Writing of Displacement by Kimberley Kinder University of Minnesota Press “The concept of travel as a liminal time-out is a recurring theme in travel writing,” Kinder writes. Planned trips typically offer the opportunity for relaxation, education, adventure, and personal growth. But what if that travel is forced? Or of an indeterminate nature and duration? In examining the experiences of displaced migrants, exiles, and refugees, Kinder provides a critical counterpoint to the traditional travel writing genre, asking the reader to instead imagine entering a “harsh liminal swamp” of uncertainty and protracted nonbelonging. What We Can Know by Ian McEwan Knopf McEwan’s nineteenth (!) novel is a speculative one, set a century into the future, after rising seas, drought, and war have reshaped the world. But in Britain, now a sleepy, limping archipelago, life goes on at a steady pace, dull enough to leave some folks waxing nostalgic for the careless, chaotic inventiveness of the 21st century. The story ponders “What we can know about the past, what we can guess about the future and what we can know about each other . . . .”