Nature in Fiction
Explore the best fiction books celebrating nature. Discover captivating stories where the natural world plays a central role, from lush forests to wild landscapes.
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The Monkey Wrench Gang
by Edward Abbey
Ex-Green Beret George Hayduke has returned from war to find his beloved southwestern desert threatened by industrial development. Joining with Bronx exile and feminist saboteur Bonnie Abzug, wilderness guide and outcast Mormon Seldom Seen Smith, and libertarian billboard torcher Doc Sarvis, M.D., Hayduke is ready to fight the power—taking on the strip miners, clear-cutters, and the highway, dam, and bridge builders who are threatening the natural habitat. The Monkey Wrench Gang is on the move—and peaceful coexistence be damned!
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Hayduke Lives!
by Edward Abbey
George Washington Hayduke, an ex-Green Beret, gathers his friends, the Monkey Wrench Gang, to oppose developers and the world's largest earth-moving machine
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August Roads
by Kirk Robinson
August Roads tells two stories of struggle and redemption set against the remote wilds of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and along the historical grace of the Natchez Trace ParkwayIn ANWAR, Gillam Wheaton Taylor—Wheat to his friends—is an urban professional who becomes embroiled in the serpentine maneuverings of politics in Washington D.C. Struggling to reconcile success with happiness, he becomes obsessed with the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge during the 2000 presidential campaigns of Al Gore and George W. Bush. He is lured north, toward a place so far outside of his experience that “he couldn't even visualize it.” His journey into the unknown reveals fundamental truths, but leaves him balanced precariously between life and death.In The Trace, Charles Bear Winston is in a race against time to resolve the pain and tragedy of his life. As his body fails him, he journeys with his aging mother along the Natchez Trace Parkway, an historic route that winds gracefully for almost 450 miles from the cypress swamps of Mississippi to the forested hills of Tennessee, passing the birth places of Elvis Presley and Oprah Winfrey as well as ancient Indian mounds and Civil War battle sites. He reconnects with the forests and the fields, the history and the wildlife, as he urgently searches for the meaning of home. But does he have enough time?Kirk Ward Robinson has been to the places he describes in August Roads. He has been startled and terrified by a grizzly bear in the bush, smelled its fetid breath up close. He has wandered through the ice fogs of the northern latitudes, has gazed down upon the vast splendor of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge from a high mountain pass, and has bicycled the length of the Natchez Trace Parkway in both directions, almost 900 miles through a narrow corridor of natural and human history. His books, articles and stories read with the authenticity of true experience, revealing the essential importance of wild and special places in America.
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A Friend of the Earth
by T.C. Boyle
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • From the award–winning author of The Tortilla Curtain comes an “entertaining and informative” (Chicago Tribune) novel about global warming and ecological collapse. “Funny and touching, antic and affecting . . . while Boyle’s humor is as black as ever, he demonstrates that satire can coexist with psychological realism, comedy with compassion.”—Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times It is the year 2025. Global warming is a reality. The biosphere has collapsed, and most mammals—not to mention fish, birds, and frogs—are extinct. Tyrone Tierwater is eking out a bleak living in southern California, managing a pop star’s private menagerie that “only a mother could love”—scruffy hyenas, jackals, warthogs, and three down-at-the-mouth lions. It wasn’t always like this for Ty. Once he was a passionate environmentalist, so committed to saving the earth that he became an eco-terrorist and, ultimately, a convicted felon. As a member of the radical group Earth Forever!, he unwittingly endangered both his daughter, Sierra, and his wife, Andrea. Now, just when he’s trying to survive in a world torn by obdurate storms and winnowing drought, Andrea comes back into his life. Blending idealism and satire, A Friend of the Earth addresses the ultimate questions of human love and the survival of the species.
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Where the Sea Used to Be
by Rick Bass
A romance in the wilds of Montana between an oil prospector and a woman who studies wolves. Together they face the forces of nature and the strong-willed Texan who is her father and his employer.
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Hungry for Home
by 'Asta Bowen
Transforming the territorial conflict between humanity and animals into a remarkable work of fiction, Hungry for Home is the story of Marta, a cunning wolf mother of the Western United States, and her struggle to protect her family. "Rescued" and relocated by a group of well-meaning naturalists, Marta is determined to return home with her pups. Their journey, brimming with exciting adventures, heart-stopping hardships, and glorious moments of triumph, takes readers into a world very different from our own. Bowen depicts the wolves without false sentimentality in portraits true to the real nature of wolves in the wild.
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Fire on the Mountain
by Edward Abbey
Fire on the Mountain Grandfather John Vogelin's land is his life -- a barren stretch of New Mexican wilderness, mercifully bypassed by civilization. Then the government moves in. And suddenly the elderly, mule-stubborn rancher is confronting the combined land-grabbing greed of the County Sheriff, the Department of the Interior, the Atomic Energy Commission and the U.S. Air Force. But a tough old man is like a mountain lion: if you back hom into a conner, he'll come out fighting.
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Ecotopia
by Ernest Callenbach
Classic novel portraying a humane and joyous sustainable state in America.
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Earth Abides
by George Rippey Stewart
Returning from a field trip, Isherwood Williams discovers that a mysterious plague has destroyed human civilization during his absence and makes his way to San Francisco, where he finds a few survivors who build a small community, living like their pioneer ancestors. Reprint. 20,000 first printing.
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Icefields
by Thomas Wharton
"This is an uncommonly beautiful novel. Its final sentence 'I want to show you something rather extraordinary' might have been its first. Nearly every page gave me something new to marvel at an image, a gesture, a sudden insight into a character. Like the glacier that haunts its people (and the reader), this novel rears up a shining ice-cathedral of a story, lovely, mysterious, and awe-inspiring. By the end, I felt that one small, remarkable piece of Canada had been examined with such penetrating eyes that it had begun to glow with hints of universal truth." Jack Hodgins
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The Mosquito Coast
by Paul Theroux
In one of Theroux's most magnificent novels, the paranoid, brilliant, and self-destructive Allie Fox takes his family to live in the Honduran jungle, determined to build a civilization better than the one they've left.
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The Call of the Wild, White Fang & To Build a Fire
by Jack London
The Call of the Wild—Selected by the Modern Library as one of the 100 best novels of all time To this day Jack London is the most widely read American writer in the world," E. L. Doctorow wrote in The New York Times Book Review. Generally considered to be London's greatest achievement, The Call of the Wild brought him international acclaim when it was published in 1903. His story of the dog Buck, who learns to survive in the bleak Yukon wilderness, is viewed by many as his symbolic autobiography. "No other popular writer of his time did any better writing than you will find in The Call of the Wild," said H. L. Mencken. "Here, indeed, are all the elements of sound fiction." White Fang (1906), which London conceived as a "complete antithesis and companion piece to The Call of the Wild," is the tale of an abused wolf-dog tamed by exposure to civilization. Also included in this volume is "To Build a Fire," a marvelously desolate short story set in the Klondike, but containing all the elements of a classic Greek tragedy. "The quintessential Jack London is in the on-rushing compulsive-ness of his northern stories," noted James Dickey. "Few men have more convincingly examined the connection between the creative powers of the individual writer and the unconscious drive to breed and to survive, found in the natural world. . . . London is in and committed to his creations to a degree very nearly unparalleled in the composition of fiction."
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Skywater
by Melinda Worth Popham
“This spare and affecting novel has the precision and the stinging sweetness of a fable... a wonderful book.” —Thomas McGuane “Evoking a rich sense of place and animal behavior, (Popham) lets us see through very different eyes.” —The Seattle Times “A parable of making the best of a world short of everything. The people and the creatures of Popham’s fable are right, they belong, and they mean.” —Wallace Stegner “Refreshing... life-affirming... the first book I’ve read in a long time that left me with teary eyes at the end.” —The San Diego Tribune
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Elena of the Stars
by C. P. Rosenthal
On the brink of adulthood, young Elena visits her widowed grandfather and befriends her late grandmother's golden stallion, and Elena and the horse are thrust into a primal battle against the elements that tests their mutual trust