Nature & Landscape

New York, 2040. In a half-flooded city devastated by environmental and social collapse, a young pigeon named Blaze survives with her tightly bonded flock in an abandoned tower. Life is dangerous, but her community has rules that keep them alive—until Blaze rescues a solitary stranger whose memories of the world before the catastrophe challenge everything she believes. As she navigates the complexities of loyalty, love, and motherhood, Blaze must decide whether to follow the traditions of her flock or dare to imagine a different future. An inventive, moving tale of survival, belonging, and the courage to change.

Twenty-three-year-old Yosoye arrives in Lagos eager to begin a new chapter of her life. Working for a prestigious architectural firm, she finds herself immersed in a world of glamorous social gatherings, ambitious colleagues, and exciting possibilities. Her company is developing Omi City, an extravagant new housing project built on reclaimed land and presented as a symbol of Lagos’s bright future. For Yosoye, the development represents progress and the promise of a city reinventing itself. But beneath the glittering surface, something is deeply wrong. Stories of pregnant women walking into the city’s waters and drowning begin to spread, while the construction of Omi City continues to reshape the landscape and displace the past. When Yosoye discovers that she is pregnant herself, the strange events around her become increasingly difficult to ignore. As she investigates the mysteries surrounding the development, she is forced to confront unsettling connections between motherhood, urban expansion, and the forces that haunt the city. Blending literary fiction, horror, and Nigerian folklore, Aguda’s atmospheric novel examines the human and environmental costs of progress. It explores the complicated relationship between women and their bodies, the weight of ancestral histories, and the question of what a society sacrifices when it builds its future on buried ground.

In Ghost-Eye, Amitav Ghosh weaves together reincarnation, family secrets, and environmental concerns across two generations. In 1969 Calcutta, three-year-old Varsha Gupta begins describing memories of a previous life, including a different mother and a home beside a river. Her unusual claims lead her family to Dr. Shoma Bose, a psychiatrist investigating cases of apparent reincarnation. Decades later, Varsha’s case file attracts the attention of environmental activists, drawing Shoma’s nephew Dinu into a search that brings buried memories and unexpected connections to light. Moving between India and contemporary Brooklyn, the novel blends magical realism, mystery, and ecological fiction to explore the relationship between human identity, memory, and the natural world. It raises questions about how lives are interconnected and how humanity’s relationship with the environment shapes both personal histories and collective futures.

Set in the mountainous countryside of Oman, Honey Hunger follows Azzan, a solitary beekeeper whose devotion to bees and the search for wild honey offers him a refuge from disappointment and personal turmoil. When he encounters Thamna, a shepherd woman with honey-coloured eyes, he becomes captivated by her, opening the possibility of connection in a life marked by loneliness and troubled relationships. As Azzan navigates family expectations, alcohol addiction, and the fragile bonds between people, his work with bees becomes a source of purpose and healing. Yet an unexpected accident threatens to destroy everything he has built, forcing him to confront loss and the uncertainty of starting over. Through vivid descriptions of Oman’s mountains, villages, and delicate ecosystems, Alqasmi creates an intimate portrait of a community whose lives are deeply intertwined with the natural world. The novel explores longing, resilience, and the complicated relationship between humans and their environment, revealing how the pursuit of something as precious as honey can reflect a deeper hunger for meaning and belonging.

In There Are Rivers in the Sky, Elif Shafak weaves together the lives of three characters connected by water, memory, and the ancient city of Nineveh. In Victorian London, Arthur, a gifted boy born into poverty, develops a fascination with the Epic of Gilgamesh. In nineteenth-century Ottoman Mesopotamia, Narin, a young Yazidi girl, faces the threat of displacement as her community’s traditions and homeland come under pressure. In contemporary London, Zaleekhah, a hydrologist struggling with personal loss, becomes drawn into the histories of the Tigris and its surrounding landscapes. Moving across centuries and continents, the novel explores the enduring connections between human lives, ancient civilizations, and the natural world. Through its interwoven narratives, Shafak examines environmental destruction, cultural heritage, religious persecution, and the transformative power of water as a source of life, memory, and renewal.

Bell and Sigh are a young couple who decide to abandon conventional life and retreat to a remote house in the Irish countryside with their dogs. Leaving behind the city, their friends, and their families, they build a quiet world of their own, shaped by daily rituals, changing seasons, and the rhythms of the natural landscape. Nearby stands a mountain they are told offers a view of seven standing stones, seven schools, and seven church steeples. They promise to climb it, but year after year, the mountain remains unconquered. Spanning seven years, Seven Steeples follows the couple as their lives become increasingly intertwined with the land around them. With lyrical prose and a keen eye for the overlooked details of ordinary existence, Sara Baume explores solitude, intimacy, and the uneasy boundary between freedom and isolation. It is a contemplative novel about stepping away from society to discover what it means to build a life—and whether withdrawing from the world can ever truly bring us closer to ourselves.

Set in a remote Polish village near the Czech border, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead follows Janina Duszejko, an eccentric older woman who lives in isolation, cares for summer houses, studies astrology, and feels a deep connection with animals and the natural world. When several men in the surrounding community die under mysterious circumstances, Janina develops her own theory about the killings, believing that the animals are taking revenge on those who have harmed them. However, the local authorities dismiss her ideas, partly because of her gender, age, and unconventional beliefs. As the investigation unfolds, the novel combines the structure of a murder mystery with philosophical reflections on justice, morality, and humanity’s relationship with other living creatures. Through dark humour and an unsettling narrative, Tokarczuk challenges assumptions about who deserves sympathy and whose suffering matters. The novel questions human dominance over nature and explores the blurred boundaries between justice, vengeance, and madness.

In Gun Island, Amitav Ghosh follows Deen Datta, a Brooklyn-based Indian rare-book dealer whose fascination with an obscure Bengali legend leads him on an unexpected journey from Kolkata to the Sundarbans and Venice. As he investigates the story of a merchant who escaped the wrath of the snake goddess Manasa Devi, Deen encounters mysterious coincidences, ancient myths, and people whose lives have been transformed by migration and environmental upheaval. Along the way, he witnesses the devastating effects of climate change, including rising seas, extreme weather, and threats to vulnerable communities. Blending folklore, history, and contemporary fiction, Ghosh explores the connections between human migration, ecological crisis, and cultural memory, questioning whether ancient stories might offer new ways of understanding the environmental challenges of the modern world.

Set on the vast steppes of Soviet Kazakhstan during the final decades of the USSR, The Dead Wander in the Desert tells the story of a community whose existence is threatened by the ecological destruction of the Aral Sea. Nasyr, an elderly fisherman who becomes a village mullah, watches as the waters that once sustained his people recede, leaving behind a barren landscape and a vanishing way of life. His son, Kakharman, challenges the authorities responsible for diverting the rivers that feed the sea to support ambitious agricultural projects, particularly cotton cultivation. But his struggle against the Soviet bureaucracy seems almost impossible. Through the lives of a Kazakh family and their neighbors, Seisenbayev explores the devastating consequences of environmental mismanagement, political oppression, and the pursuit of progress at any cost. Blending social history, philosophical reflection, and the rhythms of traditional storytelling, the novel also recalls the wider tragedies endured by the Kazakh people under Soviet rule. Both an elegy for a disappearing world and a warning about humanity’s relationship with nature, it gives a deeply personal dimension to one of the twentieth century’s greatest environmental catastrophes.

Bangkok Wakes to Rain weaves together the lives of people connected to a single house in Bangkok across different periods of Thai history. From a nineteenth-century missionary confronting unfamiliar beliefs to a contemporary musician navigating relationships and personal uncertainty, the novel explores how individual lives are shaped by a city constantly transformed by time, migration, and environmental change. As Bangkok expands and modernizes, recurring floods and rising waters reflect the city’s vulnerability to climate change and its complicated relationship with the natural world. Through interconnected stories that move between past, present, and imagined futures, Pitchaya Sudbanthad examines memory, colonial influence, cultural identity, and the impermanence of human existence. The novel presents Bangkok as a living, evolving character, revealing how personal histories and collective memories remain intertwined with the places people call home.

Set against the stark beauty of Central Asia, Death of the Snake Catcher is a collection of short stories by Turkmen writer Ak Welsapar, blending magical realism, folklore, political commentary, and intimate portraits of human life. The title story follows an elderly snake catcher who confronts a giant cobra in the heart of the desert. Their encounter becomes a symbolic dialogue about humanity’s relationship with the natural world, exploring the uneasy balance between fear, power, vulnerability, and survival. Elsewhere in the collection, Welsapar depicts lovers separated by political divisions, young people confronting injustice, and ordinary individuals navigating a world shaped by repression and uncertainty. His stories move between the mythical and the everyday, revealing the emotional richness of Turkmen culture while exposing the pressures faced by people living under authoritarian rule. Drawing on vivid landscapes and expressive storytelling, Welsapar portrays characters who endure hardship with remarkable resilience and optimism. The collection offers an unusual literary window into a country whose culture and experiences remain relatively unfamiliar to many international readers.

Palestinian Walks is a lyrical memoir in which Palestinian lawyer and writer Raja Shehadeh recounts years of walking through the hills and valleys of the West Bank. Through six walks taken over several decades, Shehadeh explores a landscape he has known since childhood, documenting its natural beauty, ancient paths, wildflowers, and rocky hillsides. As he returns to familiar places, he witnesses how expanding settlements, roads, and political restrictions transform the countryside and limit access to land that once felt open and familiar. Combining personal reflection, nature writing, and historical observation, Shehadeh examines the relationship between landscape, memory, and belonging. His walks become both a way of reconnecting with the natural world and a means of understanding the changes reshaping Palestinian life. The book offers an intimate portrait of a threatened environment, revealing how the loss of familiar places can also mean the erosion of cultural memory, personal freedom, and a sense of home.