Earth & Animal Liberation Fiction

Setting is everything in this slow-building nightmare on the high-seas. A whaling ship suggests chilling imagery right off the bat, but it is Nahil's mastery of atmosphere that cements the feeling of inescapable doom. You'll taste the salt on your lips and feel the dread in your own belly in this perfect marriage of ecological and queer horror.
—Esmé, Firestorm Collective member

On the first page we learn that Mi'kmaq artist Rita Francis has vanished during her artist residency in a remote cabin in the wetlands, leaving behind only her most inspired work yet. Each chapter begins with a gallery's description of her vivid mixed medium creations depicting unsettling images of dark figures embedded in scenes of ecological collapse. Green Fuse Burning reflects on, and is itself an example of, the ways we document global horrors such as climate change and grieve personal and cultural loss.
—Esmé, Firestorm Collective member

My favorite book of this century so far! I keep putting off writing this blurb because every time I pick up Open Throat I re-read it and fall back in love with this gay-ass big cat and then I have to spend the whole rest of the day thinking about mountain lions and humans and sex and bodies and death and climate change and bad dads and NY v. LA and what is even possible in this world. Henry Hoke is a magician.
—Andrea Lawlor, author of Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl

Like all great writers of fiction, Ursula K. Le Guin creates imaginary worlds that restore us, hearts eased, to our own.
—The Boston Globe

N. K. Jemisin's Broken Earth trilogy is set on an alternate earth called the 'Stillness,' where society is structured around surviving catastrophic climate events—earthquakes, tsunamis, volcanoes—and a deep hatred for Orogenes, individuals with the supernatural ability to control and manipulate geo-energy. This is epic sci-fi world building, profoundly informed by racial injustice and climate change, written by a Black woman. This is some god tier shit.
—Beck, Firestorm Collective member 

Karen Joy Fowler has written the book she's always had in her to write. With all the quiet strangeness of her amazing Sarah Canary, and all the breezy wit and skill of her beloved Jane Austen Book Club, and a new, urgent gravity, she has told the story of an American family. An unusual family—but aren't all families unusual?  A very American, an only-in-America family—and yet an everywhere family, whose children, parents, siblings, love one another very much, and damage one another badly.  Does the love survive the damage?  Will human beings survive the damage they do to the world they love so much?  This is a strong, deep, sweet novel.
—Ursula K. Le Guin, author of The Dissposessed

An elegiac meditation on human and nonhuman loss... Immersive and haunting and quietly arresting.
—Jeff VanderMeer, author of The Southern Reach Trilogy

Classic SF in the mode of Ursula K Le Guin or Octavia Butler... This is a millennial’s novel, featuring young people trying to make their way through an uncaring, corrupt and intermittently violent world... Heartfelt and absorbing fiction.
—The Guardian

A thoughtful, fearlessly low-key novel about the role of our species on the planet... laid out for us with an originality and a clarity that few would deny.
—The New York Times Book Review

“Kaleidoscopic... Unferth’s lens, which telescopes through time and space, is unafraid to linger on the bizarre and vicious cycle of birth-death, need-fulfillment and supply-demand that this phantom-run barn universe perpetuates... Yet Unferth never traffics in gratuitous shock. Instead, her sentences and constantly shifting point of view are embroidered with a great deal of unexpected tenderness and optimism.
—Los Angeles Times

Monumental... The Overstory accomplishes what few living writers from either camp, art or science, could attempt. Using the tools of the story, he pulls readers heart-first into a perspective so much longer-lived and more subtly developed than the human purview that we gain glimpses of a vast, primordial sensibility, while watching our own kind get whittled down to size... A gigantic fable of genuine truths.
—Barbara Kingsolver, author of Unsheltered

Something startlingly new... an action-packed story that's full of moral complexity. This is the futuristic vision that everybody needs right now.
—Charlie Jane Anders, author of All the Birds in the Sky