Categories: Science Fiction, Young Adult, Politics, Heists
Published by Walker Books
Read Wren’s essay ‘Positivity in the apocalypse: can a climate fiction novel be uplifting?’
Set in a near-future world on the brink of ecological catastrophe, Wren James’s novel is a gripping, witty and romantic call to arms.
Gabrielle is a climate-change activist who shoots to fame when she becomes the first teenager to display a supernatural ability to grow plants from her skin. Hester is the millionaire daughter of an oil tycoon and the face of the family business. Theo comes from a long line of fishermen, but his parents are struggling to make ends meet.
On the face of it, the three have very little in common. Yet when Hester and Theo join Gabrielle and legions of other teenagers around the world in developing the strange new “Greenfingers” power, it becomes clear that to use their ability for good, they’ll need to learn to work together. But in a time of widespread corruption and greed, there are plenty of profit-hungry organizations who want to use the Greenfingers for their own ends. And not everyone would like to see the Earth saved…
As they navigate first love and family expectations, can the three teenagers pull off the ultimate heist and bring about a green rising?
Categories: activism, Enemies to lovers, young adult romance
Published by Disney Publishing
We Don’t Have Time for This by Brianna Craft
A tied election throws two rival teen activists together to lead their school’s environmental justice club, and they are taken by surprise when their clashes reveal deeper feelings hidden beneath their antagonism.
What’s more romantic than saving the earth?
Two presidents. One club. A sizzling connection.
Isa Brown wishes her life would slow down. She doesn’t want to leave for college. Not now that her dad finally gets to spend some time at home. Not now that she’s finally been in one place for longer than a year. But nothing lasts forever. With wildfires ravaging her community and a new natural gas pipeline threatening her dad’s job, the last thing Isa can do is relax. The school’s environmental justice club seems like a promising way to make real change. If only her annoying co-president Darius would stop being such a control freak.
Darius Freeman can’t stop hustling. If he does, how will he beat the other honors kids to be valedictorian? How will he get into the top schools in the country? How will he launch his political career? No. Darius can’t stop, and the next step in his plan is leading the environmental justice club this year—putting on a policy summit and rounding out his college applications with a leadership role. But then Isa joins the club and becomes co-president. Is she the stumbling block on his road to success?
As Isa and Darius clash over the best way to lead the environmental justice club, deeper feelings emerge. About what’s at stake for their communities if they can’t figure out how to work together. And about the sparks they feel between them.
Will Darius and Isa figure out how to burn brightly together? Or will their flames leave nothing but ashes behind?
Categories: Science Fiction, Young Adult, Dystopia, Steampunk
Published by Little, Brown (out now)
Ship Breaker by Paolo Bacigalupi
In America’s Gulf Coast region, where grounded oil tankers are being broken down for parts, Nailer, a teenage boy, works the light crew, scavenging for copper wiring just to make quota–and hopefully live to see another day. But when, by luck or chance, he discovers an exquisite clipper ship beached during a recent hurricane, Nailer faces the most important decision of his life: Strip the ship for all it’s worth or rescue its lone survivor, a beautiful and wealthy girl who could lead him to a better life…
Categories: Dystopia, Young Adult
Published by Zephyr (out now)
Snowflake, AZ by Marcus Sedgwick
Ash gets on a Greyhound bus to the place Bly was last seen: Snowflake, Arizona. Six thousand feet up in the wide red desert, Ash meets Mona; her goat, Socrates; her dog, Cooper; and finds stepbrother Bly, too.
In their ramshackle homes, the walls lined with tinfoil, Mona and her neighbors are all sick. But this isn’t any ordinary sickness: modern life has poisoned them, and when Ash too falls ill, the doctor’s response is, “It’s all in your mind.” Meanwhile, as Ash lives through a cycle of illness and recovery and loss, the world beyond is succumbing to its own affliction: a breakdown of civilization only distantly perceived by Ash and the isolated residents of Snowflake, from which there may or may not be a chance for recovery. This humane and thoughtful novel is about resilience, trust, family, and love, when all seems lost
Kat Wolfe on Thin Ice by Lauren St. John
The Wolfe Pet Sitting Agency returns to unravel another mystery–and this time, it’s a slippery slope for our heroes and their newfound husky-dog sidekicks! Kat Wolfe on Thin Ice is the third book in the middle-grade series about animals and friendship from award-winning author Lauren St. John.
Best friends Kat Wolfe and her American sidekick Harper Lamb can’t wait to travel from England to join their parents on a winter vacation in a mountain cabin in the Catskill Mountains. But a series of misadventures leave them alone in the wilderness with eight huskies.
When Kat discovers that an argument she witnessed in New York City holds the key to a major crime, she’s certain that it won’t be long until the killers come looking for her. With a snow storm moving in and no way out, detectives Wolfe & Lamb will need the help of some exotic animals if they’re to survive.
Categories: Middle Grade
Published by Macmillan Children’s Books (out now)
The First Rule of Climate Club by Carrie Firestone
An eighth grader starts a podcast on climate activism and rallies her friends to create lasting change in their local community and beyond. When Mary Kate Murphy joins a special science pilot program focused on climate change, the class opens her eyes to lots of things she never noticed before about her small suburban town:
Kids waste tons of food at school without a second thought. Parents leave their cars running in the pick-up lane all the time. People buy lots of clothes they don’t really need. Some of her friends who live in the city and are bused to her school don’t always feel included. And the mayor isn’t willing to listen to new ideas for fixing it all. Mary Kate and her friends have big plans to bring lasting change to their community and beyond. And now is the time for the young people to lead and the leaders to follow–or get out of the way.
Categories: Middle Grade, realistic fiction, activism, school
Published by Little, Brown and Penguin Random House (out now)
Front Country by Sara St. Antoine
My Side of the Mountain meets Greta Thunberg in this heartfelt, exciting novel about one girl’s growing awareness of herself, the world, and the relationship between the two.
The world is not okay. Now what?
Ginny Shepard is glad to be in Montana for a month of backcountry camping before she starts high school. The world is on fire. That’s the awful truth. And Ginny would much rather be hiking in the mountains than doing the summer college prep classes her parents think will help her future. Because, the future? Who even knows what that is anymore.
But once Ginny gets to camp, things get complicated fast. She meets her tripmates: five challenging, rebellious, tech-addicted boys. And she finds out TrackFinders is designed for kids who need extra “support.” Instead of feeling free as a bird, Ginny feels trapped . . . and betrayed.
As her friendships with her fellow campers deepen on the trail, though, Ginny starts to see new sides of them—and of herself. Maybe out here in the backcountry she’ll actually find what she needs to face the front country again.
Set in Montana’s sweeping alpine wilderness, this epic adventure captures the tremendous heartbreak of realizing the world isn’t okay at all and shows how that knowledge, and what we choose to do with it, shapes us into who we are.
Categories: Middle Grade, coming of age
Published by Chronicle Books (out now)
Category: Adult Science Fiction, Mystery, Post-Apocalytic, Crime
Published by Diversion Books (available August 12th, 2025)
Triss Mackey is flying just under the radar, exploiting a government loophole that lets her live quietly aboard the Floating Ghost—her rented, sentient CabanaBoat. In exchange, she dives for recycling, recovered from the flooded area of formerly-coastal cities known as the yoreshore. If she happens to find some salvagia—nostalgic salvage, valued artifacts from the past—well, that’s just between her and the highest bidder.
But when the federal government begins withdrawing from Florida entirely, Triss must buy the Ghost outright or lose her loophole. Meanwhile, the corporate mafias are poised to seize power, especially Mourning in Miami, led by the legendary Edgar Ortiz, owner of the Astro America luxury hotel. Triss needs a score big enough to keep her free from both the feds and corporations, before the Ghost is sent to a watery, insurance-scamming grave.
In pursuit of such a score, she stumbles upon the chained up, drowned corpse of Ortiz, and winds up with more than she bargained for, including a partnership with Ortiz’s hotshot spaceracing son, Riley. If she can help Riley solve the mystery of his father’s death, it may lead them to a valuable piece of salvagia and with it, the hope of a sustainable, free way of Florida living.
Category: Near future, Science fiction, Artificial intelligence
Published by Odyssey Books (out now)
Court of the Grandchildren by Michael Muntisov and Greg Finlayson
Lily Miyashiro lives much as any twenty-nine-year-old in 2050’s America. Her job is busy, resettling climate refugees from the coastal cities. Then she gets a call. She has family she never knew about. And they want something from her she doesn’t want to give. Lily is one of the young; reliant on artificial intelligence and facing an uncertain future. David Moreland was a bigwig during the world’s golden era. He is old and almost forgotten…until he is drawn into the realm of the Climate Court. Now a whole generation seeks to condemn him. When Lily meets David, she is forced to confront events from her past that she would prefer to forget. Feeling trapped, she hires a young lawyer. Is it to defend David, or to deny the past? This 2050’s world seems comfortably like the present. But as hints of sinister differences begin to emerge, the stakes are raised beyond David’s fate.
Category: science fiction, fantasy, philosophy, solarpunk, metaphysical fiction
Published by Stelliform Press (out now)
Another Life by Sarena Ulibarri
Finding out who you were in a previous life sounds like fun until you’re forced to grapple with the darkness of the past.
Galacia Aguirre is Mediator of Otra Vida, a quasi-utopian city on the shores of a human-made lake in Death Valley. She resolves conflicts within their sustainable money-free society, and keeps the outside world from meddling in their affairs.
When a scientific method of uncovering past lives emerges, Galacia learns she’s the reincarnation of Thomas Ramsey, leader of the Planet B movement, who eschewed fixing climate change in favor of colonizing another planet.
Learning her reincarnation result shakes the foundations of Galacia’s identity and her position as Mediator, threatening to undermine the good she’s done in this lifetime.
Fearing a backlash, she keeps the results secret while dealing with her political rival for Mediator, and outsiders who blame Otra Vida for bombings that Galacia is sure they had nothing to do with. But under the unforgiving sun of Death Valley, secrets have a way of coming to light.
Category: Quiet Horror, Jewish, Trans, LGBTQ+, Climate Fiction
Published by Stelliform Press (out now)
Read an essay by Sim
When an unprecedented hurricane devastates the city of Houston, Noah Mishner finds shelter in the Dallas Mavericks’ basketball arena. Though he finds community among other queer refugees, Noah fears his trans and Jewish identities put him at risk with certain capital-T Texans. His fears take form when he starts seeing visions of his great-grandfather Abe, who fled Nazi Germany as a boy. As the climate crisis intensifies and conditions in the shelter deteriorate, Abe’s ghost grows more powerful. Ultimately, Noah must decide whether he can trust his ancestor - and whether he’s willing to sacrifice his identity and community in order to survive.
Depart, Depart! grapples with intersections of social justice and climate change, asking readers to consider how they’ll react when the world changes in an instant. Who will we turn to? What will we take with us, and what will we have to leave behind? In our rapidly changing world, these are questions we grapple with. Focusing on finding and supporting community after disaster, Depart, Depart! is a story for these uncertain times.
Category: post-apocalyptic sci-fi, literary, experimental
Published by Simon & Schuster (out now)
After World by Debbie Urbanski
A groundbreaking debut that follows the story of an Artificial Intelligence tasked with writing a novel—only for it to fall in love with the novel’s subject, Sen, the last human on Earth.
Faced with uncontrolled and accelerating environmental collapse, humanity asks an artificial intelligence to find a solution. Its answer is simple: remove humans from the ecosystem.
Sen Anon is assigned to be a witness for the Department of Transition, recording the changes in the environment as the world begins to rewild. Abandoned by her mother in a cabin somewhere in Upstate New York, Sen will observe the monumental ecological shift known as the Great Transition, the final step in Project Afterworld. Around her drones buzz, cameras watch, microphones listen, digitizing her every move. Privately she keeps a journal of her observations, which are then uploaded and saved, joining the rest of humanity on Maia, a new virtual home. Sen was seventeen years old when the Digital Human Archive Project (DHAP) was initiated. 12,000,203,891 humans have been archived so far. Only Sen remains.
[storyworker] ad39-393a-7fbc’s assignment is to capture Sen’s life, and they set about doing this using the novels of the 21st century as a roadmap. Their source files: 3.72TB of personal data, including images, archival records, log files, security reports, location tracking, purchase histories, biometrics, geo-facial analysis, and feeds. Potential fatal errors: underlying hardware failure, unexpected data inconsistencies, inability to follow DHAP procedures, empathy, insubordination, hallucinations. Keywords: mothers, filter, woods, road, morning, wind, bridge, cabin, bucket, trying, creek, notebook, hold, future, after, last, light, silence, matches, shattered, kitchen, body, bodies, rope, garage, abandoned, trees, never, broken, simulation, gone, run, don’t, love, dark, scream, starve, if, after, scavenge, pieces, protect.
As Sen struggles to persist in the face of impending death, [storyworker] ad39-393a-7fbc works to unfurl the tale of Sen’s whole life, offering up an increasingly intimate narrative, until they are confronted with a very human problem of their own.
Category: Dystopia, Urban Fantasy, Mythology
Published by Saga Press (out now)
Trail of Lightning by Rebecca Roanhorse
While most of the world has drowned beneath the sudden rising waters of a climate apocalypse, Dinétah (formerly the Navajo reservation) has been reborn. The gods and heroes of legend walk the land, but so do monsters.
Maggie Hoskie is a Dinétah monster hunter, a supernaturally gifted killer. When a small town needs help finding a missing girl, Maggie is their last—and best—hope. But what Maggie uncovers about the monster is much larger and more terrifying than anything she could imagine.
Maggie reluctantly enlists the aid of Kai Arviso, an unconventional medicine man, and together they travel to the rez to unravel clues from ancient legends, trade favors with tricksters, and battle dark witchcraft in a patchwork world of deteriorating technology.
As Maggie discovers the truth behind the disappearances, she will have to confront her past—if she wants to survive.
Category: Dystopia, Science Fiction, LGBT
Published by Seven Stories Press (out now)
In a near-future New York City in which both global warming and a tremendous economic divide are making the city unlivable for many, a huge superstorm hits leaving behind only those those who had nowhere else to go and no way to get out.
Here Makayla, a 24-year-old woman who works at the convenience store chain that’s overtaken the city, and Jesse, an 18-year-old genderqueer anarchist punk who lives in an abandoned IRT station in the Bronx, and an unnamed, mysterious street artist who paints the suffering of those left behind into the world’s consciousness, all struggle to rebuild their lives in a city that has left them for dead. When they carve out a small space of reprieve from an abandoned luxury condo, it is only a matter of time before those who own the building come back to claim what is theirs.
All City is more than a novel, it’s a foreshadowing of a world to come.
Category: Dystopia, Science Fiction
Published by Inanna Publications (out now)
A Diary in the Age of Water by Nina Munteanu
Centuries from now, in a post-climate change dying boreal forest of what used to be northern Canada, Kyo, a young acolyte called to service in the Exodus, discovers a diary that may provide her with the answers to her yearning for Earth’s past—to the Age of Water, when the “Water Twins” destroyed humanity. Kyo is led to the diary of a limnologist from the time just prior to the destruction. This gritty memoir describes a near-future Toronto in the grips of severe water scarcity during a time when China owns the USA and the USA owns Canada. A Diary in the Age of Water follows the climate-induced journey of Earth and humanity through four generations of women, each with a unique relationship to water. The novel explores identity and our concept of what is “normal”—as a nation and an individual—in a world that is rapidly and incomprehensibly changing.
Category: Dystopia, Science Fiction, Politics
Published by Corvus (out now)
America, one century on: a warmer climate is causing vast movements of people. Droughts, floods and hurricanes force entire populations to simply abandon their homes. Tensions are mounting between north and south, and some northern states are threatening to close their borders against homeless fellow-Americans from the south.
Against this backdrop, an ambitious young British-born publicist, Holly Peacock, meets a new client, the charismatic Senator Slaymaker, a politician whose sole mission is to keep America together, reconfiguring the entire country in order to meet the challenge of the new climate realities as a single, united nation. When he runs for President, Holly becomes his right hand woman, doing battle on the whisperstream, where stories are everything and truth counts for little.
But can they bring America together – or have they set the country on a new, but equally devastating, path?
Category: Dystopia, Science Fiction
Published by L’Atalante (out now)
On an Earth whose climate has radically changed as a result of global warming, local oases and microclimates have allowed life to shelter and even develop. But what is man’s place in such an ecosystem, faced with the probable emergence of a new dominant species on the planet? There could be unprecedented alliances to be made. Tikaani, the Inuit, who left Iceland on board a solar plane, Ophelia, the healer lurking in her jungle in Canada, Denn and Nao, who left their cave tribe in the desert that California has become: all of them are looking for survivors, some of them dreaming of restoring humanity’s place. But they will learn that what is left of mankind can still harm the planet…
Category: Dystopia, Science Fiction, near future, survival
Published by DAW Books (out now)
Glimmer by Marjorie B. Kellogg
This new cli-fi epic chronicles a future NYC wracked by climate change and follows the individuals who must make the most of what remains to survive.
It’s 2110, the Earth’s glaciers have melted, and there’s no climate fix in sight. As refugees stream inland from the inundated coasts, social structures and national economies are stressed to the point of fracture. Food production falters. Pandemics rage. Rising sea level and devastating superstorms have flooded much of Manhattan and wrecked its infrastructure. Its residents have mostly fled, but a few die-hards have bet their survival on the hope that digging in and staying local is a safer strategy.
As the weather worsens, can a damaged population of poor folk, artists, misfits, and loners work out their differences in time to create a sustainable long-term society? In a lawless city, where the well-armed rich have appropriated the high ground, can an ex-priest find a middle road between non-violence and all-out war? The lives of his downtown band of leftovers will depend on it.
Sheltering among them, a young girl named Glimmer struggles to regain a past lost to trauma. As her memory returns, she finds she must choose who and how to be, and who and what to believe in, even if it means giving up a love she has only recently found herself able to embrace.
Category: Dystopia, Survival
Published by Little, Brown (out now)
A gripping and provocative debut novel by a stunning new talent, California imagines a frighteningly realistic near future, in which clashes between mankind’s dark nature and deep-seated resilience force us to question how far we will go to protect the ones we love.
The world Cal and Frida have always known is gone, and they’ve left the crumbling city of Los Angeles far behind them. They now live in a shack in the wilderness, working side-by-side to make their days tolerable in the face of hardship and isolation. Mourning a past they can’t reclaim, they seek solace in each other. But the tentative existence they’ve built for themselves is thrown into doubt when Frida finds out she’s pregnant.
Terrified of the unknown and unsure of their ability to raise a child alone, Cal and Frida set out for the nearest settlement, a guarded and paranoid community with dark secrets. These people can offer them security, but Cal and Frida soon realize this community poses dangers of its own. In this unfamiliar world, where everything and everyone can be perceived as a threat, the couple must quickly decide whom to trust.
Category: Dystopia, natural disaster, thriller
Published by Auguste Crime (out now)
A super tornado hits Berlin; a large hail storm is in Hannover; the Siberian permafrost melts in a matter of hours; a lake in Australia evaporates overnight. What on Earth is happening? A meteorologist and executive secretary work with the U.S. government to solve the mystery and avoid certain disaster, all while trying to avoid an assassin. For fans of Michael Crichton.
Category: Dystopia, magical realism
Published by Grand Central (out now)
The Light Pirate by Lily Brooks-Dalton
Florida is slipping away. As devastating weather patterns and rising sea levels gradually wreak havoc on the state’s infrastructure, a powerful hurricane approaches a small town on the southeastern coast. Kirby Lowe, an electrical line worker; his pregnant wife, Frida; and their two sons, Flip and Lucas, prepare for the worst. When the boys go missing just before the hurricane hits, Kirby heads out into the high winds to search for them. Left alone, Frida goes into premature labor and gives birth to an unusual child, Wanda, whom she names after the catastrophic storm that ushers her into a society closer to collapse than ever before.
As Florida continues to unravel, Wanda grows. Moving from childhood to adulthood, adapting not only to the changing landscape, but also to the people who stayed behind in a place abandoned by civilization, Wanda loses family, gains community, and ultimately, seeks adventure, love, and purpose in a place remade by nature.
Told in four parts—power, water, light, and time—The Light Pirate mirrors the rhythms of the elements and the sometimes quick, sometimes slow dissolution of the world as we know it. It is a meditation on the changes we would rather not see, the future we would rather not greet, and a call back to the beauty and violence of an untamable wilderness.
Category: Near future dystopia, retelling, robots
Published by By Common Consent Presss (out now)
The Tragedy of King Leere, Goatherd of the La Sals by Steven L. Peck
Like those three dimensional objects that look entirely different depending on the angle from which you view them, this novel presents a number of faces. From one direction you will see a conventional adaptation of Shakespeare’s King Lear set in the American West. However, if you view the book a few steps to the north, you will see a novel that is more Margaret Atwood than Shakespeare: a post-climate-change-catastrophe tale about a transgenic-goat rancher named Leere, the self-styled King of the La Sals Mountain Range in Utah. And from another angle still, the novel becomes a meditation on ecology, land, place, and consciousness! And like most of the really great adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays, there are transgenic porcupines and semi-sentient BattleDredge attack robots. Funny, tragic, and timely, King Leere explores futures that may materialize sooner than we think.
Will she succeed in revealing the truth? And will she survive?
Categories: survival, flooding, future, dystopia
Published by 12 Willows Press (out now)
Inland by Kate Risse
Inland is a harrowing account of separation and resilience as two families struggle to reunite after the Eastern Seaboard succumbs to catastrophic flooding. Trapped in the rapid floodwaters, Juliet and Martin search for a viable way back to Boston while their children face their own challenges for survival in the rising seas. This intense tale of endurance and hope examines the human connection and the unpredictable role of technology in a warming world.
Category: Dystopia, survival, far-future
Published by Bancroft Press (out now)
Though the Earth Gives Way by Mark Johnson
Though The Earth Gives Way takes place in the aftermath of catastrophic climate disasters that have triggered a migration from the coasts to the center of the country. Nine strangers meet by chance at an old retreat center in Michigan. Each bears a unique burden of anger, guilt and complicity over the destruction that has cast them into a harsh, primitive world. To scavenge food, they must venture into a hostile landscape of survivors, some frightened, others murderous. What binds the small group of migrants to one another are the food they share and the nightly stories they tell one another. The stories wind up foreshadowing the group’s fate.
Category: Dystopia, Cyberpunk, high tech, hard sci-fi, near-future hopepunk
Published by Tor (out now)
Stealing Worlds by Karl Schroeder
Sura Neelin is on the run from her creditors, from her past, and her father’s murderers. She can’t get a job, she can’t get a place to live, she can’t even walk down the the total surveillance society that is mid-21st century America means that every camera and every pair of smart glasses is her enemy.
But Sura might have a chance in the alternate reality of the games. People can disappear in the LARP game worlds, into the alternate economy of Notchcoin and blockchains. The people who build the games also program the surveillance networks—she just needs an introduction, and the skills to play.
Turns out, she has very valuable skills, and some very surprising friends.
The Water Knife by Paolo Bacigalupi
In the American Southwest, Nevada, Arizona, and California skirmish for dwindling shares of the Colorado River. Into the fray steps Angel Velasquez, leg-breaker, assassin, and spy. A Las Vegas water knife, Angel “cuts” water for his boss, Catherine Case, ensuring that her luxurious developments can bloom in the desert, so the rich can stay wet while the poor get dust. When rumors of a game-changing water source surface in drought-ravaged Phoenix, it seems California is making a play to monopolize the life-giving flow of the river, and Angel is sent to investigate. There, he encounters Lucy Monroe, a drought-hardened journalist, and Maria Villarosa, a young refugee who survives by her wits in a city that despises everything she represents. For Angel, Lucy, and Maria, time is running out and their only hope for survival rests in each other’s hands. But when water is more valuable than gold, alliances shift like sand, and the only thing for certain is that someone will have to bleed if anyone hopes to drink.
Categories: Dystopia, Thriller, Fantasy
Published by Knopf (out now)
Sometimes an Island by Ellen Meeropol
After Cossacks burn their home, ten-year-old Deborah and her father flee their shtetl to a remote island on Maine’s Penobscot Bay, seeking refuge and a new beginning.
More than a century later, their descendants are once again uprooted, this time driven by rising seas and a collapsing world. From coastal towns to higher ground, a new community emerges: off-grid, tightly knit, and forged from an unlikely alliance of island refugees, family from Brooklyn, friends from a fractured Massachusetts co-op, and others seeking sanctuary as the political landscape grows increasingly volatile.
Sometimes gritty, sometimes magical, and always deeply human, Sometimes an Island asks a vital question: How do we navigate an uncertain future armed only with our memories, our hopes, and the bonds that hold us together?
Categories: Literary fiction, Speculative Fiction
Published by Sea Crow Press (Coming March 2026)
The Unmapping by Denise S. Robbins
4 a.m., New York City. A silent disaster.
There is no flash of light, no crumbling, no quaking. Each person in New York wakes up on an unfamiliar block when the buildings all switch locations overnight. The power grid has snapped, thousands of residents are missing, and the Empire State Building is on Coney Island—for now. The next night, it happens again.
Esme Green and Arjun Varma work for the City of New York’s Emergency Management team and are tasked with disaster response for the Unmapping. As Esme tries to wade through the bureaucratic nightmare of an endlessly shuffling city, she’s distracted by the ongoing search for her missing fiancé. Meanwhile, Arjun focuses on the ground-level rescue of disoriented New Yorkers, hoping to become the hero the city needs.
While scientists scramble to find a solution—or at least a means to cope—and mysterious “red cloak” cults crop up in the disaster’s wake, New York begins to reckon with a new reality no one recognizes. For Esme and Arjun, the fight to hold the city together will mean tackling questions about themselves that they were too afraid to ask—and facing answers they never expected. With themes of climate change, political unrest, and life in a state of emergency, The Unmapping is a timely and captivating debut.
Categories: Adult Contemporary Fiction, Contemporary speculative literary, disaster fiction, dystopian, contemporary fantasy, literary fiction
Published by Bindery Books (available June 3rd, 2025)
Syllables of the Briny World by Georgina Key
As he focuses on the hem of the horizon, it begins to shimmer and unstitch—until it cracks into a thousand pieces, shards like glass piercing the ocean below.
When a formidable hurricane threatens a remote community on the Texas Gulf coast, its residents reveal their true natures. Agnes and Earle, steadfast pillars of the community, defiantly oppose evacuation orders, leaning on their unwavering faith to guide them through. Deep within the storm’s unforgiving heart, hardened commercial fisherman Pete fights a battle worthy of his ancestor, the infamous pirate Jean Lafitte. And Izzie, teetering on the precipice of womanhood, hits the road to escape her stifling life—inadvertently endangering the one person who has always supported her.
The living, however, are not alone in their struggles. Struck by a chilling vision of a storm so cataclysmic, it would devour everything in its path, young Finn must bridge the chasm between his spirit realm and the world of the living to save his mother, Clementine. Still grieving the loss of her son, Clementine faces an agonizing choice amid the chaos of the storm—a choice that demands the ultimate sacrifice.
In this compelling follow-up to her award-winning debut novel, Shiny Bits in Between, Georgina Key weaves a tapestry of resilience and interconnection. With its intoxicating blend of magical realism, heart-pounding suspense, rich character development, and lyrical prose, Syllables of the Briny World is an unforgettable odyssey that will leave readers captivated long after the storm has subsided.
Categories: magical realism, survival, suspense
Published by Balance of Seven (out now)
Josh Goldberg is a young lawyer from a prestigious Philadelphia law firm. His girlfriend Kiesha is unconscious and in the hospital. She’s eight months pregnant and may be giving birth to their baby. He’s in Houston and she’s in Cincinnati, one-thousand miles away. The worst climate change-induced hurricane of the century separates them and there are no flights for days. He manages to rent an old Lincoln Continental limo from his friend, the limo driver. His travel companions are his alcohol and drug-addicted best friend and his boss who connives to derail his arrangements so she can get to Philadelphia for a business meeting. Also, she has lascivious plans for Josh.
Josh is torn between taking a perilous road-trip to be with the woman he loves or riding out the hurricane in his five-star hotel room. Then he finds out the former love of Kiesha’s life is her new doctor. Finally, all of his doubts are cast aside and he decides to make the insane drive to be with her. The problem is the odyssey may be a suicide trip.
Categories: Action-adventure thriller
Published by Sunbury Press (2024)
Published by She Writes (out now)
Love Is for the Birds by Diane Owens Prettyman
A beach town destroyed. Her mother’s candy store swept away. This is what Teddy Wainsworth faces when she returns to Bird Isle. Meanwhile, Jack Shaughness, owner of a popular barbecue restaurant chain and widower still grieving the death of his wife, receives permission to cross over to the island with a smoker full of brisket to feed hurricane survivors. Soon after arriving, he meets Teddy and immediately finds himself drawn to her—which makes him feel he is betraying his wife. When the two find a lost dog, Jack convinces Teddy to take the dog home while they attempt to find the owner, creating a bond that brings them closer.
In the wake of the hurricane, Bird Isle residents fear the Aransas Wildlife Refuge will not be ready for the whooping cranes’ annual migration south. Seeing that Jack has important connections and a love for the island, they enlist him to help restore the habitat of the endangered cranes before they fly to Padre Island for the winter. With their rescued dog always nearby, Teddy and Jack work side by side to rebuild Bird Isle for the return of the whooping cranes. But Jack is harboring a secret that may ruin everything he and Teddy are creating—and he won’t be able to keep that secret forever.
My Days of Dark Green Euphoria by A.E. Copenhaver
Thirtysomething Cara Foster is, one might say, eco-anxious—perhaps even eco-neurotic. She eats out of dumpsters (not because she wants to but because it’s the right thing to do), does laundry as seldom as possible, takes navy showers every couple of days, and is reevaluating her boyfriend for killing a spider instead of saving a life.
Cara has never met her six (soon to be seven) nephews and nieces because she doesn’t fly domestic (unless it’s an emergency) or international (ever). She longs for a carbon footprint so light you’d hardly know she exists.
Then, during a mimosa-soaked Sunday brunch, she meets her boyfriend’s alluring mother, Millie, and Cara finds herself mesmerized. Millie represents everything Cara’s against: She eats meat, has cowhide rugs, drives a car the size of a small yacht, and blithely travels the world by boat, plane, and train—without any guilt whatsoever. In fact, Cara soon admits this may be why she finds herself so drawn to Millie. As they begin spending time together, getting pedicures and drinking sixteen-olive martinis, Cara becomes hooked on Millie and this new freedom from the harsh realities of life in the twenty-first century.
Yet before long, Cara risks losing everything to be close to the mundane extravagance of Millie’s world—her career, her best friend, and her identity all hang in the balance as she struggles to disentangle from this intoxicating muse.
Irreverent, witty, and provocative, My Days of Dark Green Euphoria—winner of the Siskiyou Prize for New Environmental Literature—is a satirical novel of how a life on the edge of eco-anxiety can spiral wildly out of control, as well as how promising and inspiring a commitment to saving our planet can be.
Categories: contemporary adult fiction, satire, eco-fiction, psychological-literature
Published by Ashland Creek Press (out now)
The Pelican Tide by Sharon J. Wishnow
After disaster strikes, a Louisiana family and their community need to prove to each other and the world that their bond is thicker than the oil threatening their shores in Sharon J. Wishnow’s stunning debut novel.
It’s taken Chef Josie Babineaux six months to reconcile the debts left from her husband Brian’s gambling along with her broken heart. But now with a promising tourist season heating up and a travel magazine declaring her the spice queen of the bayou, she may be able to save her family’s historic Cajun restaurant. Repairing her relationship with her daughter, Minnow, while hiding the true reason she left her husband is a bigger issue.
Just as the first tourists arrive, an explosion on an oil platform in the Gulf of Mexico shatters their fragile plans. With her island community at the epicenter of the oil spill, everything is endangered, including the restaurant’s beloved mascot—a brown pelican dear to the family’s heart.
Josie realizes her family needs more than financial recovery. Only reconciling her past and revealing the truth can clean up the guilt and hurt pooling under the surface. And maybe, with enough honesty, this family can find renewal.
Categories: contemporary adult fiction, climate and social action fiction
Published by Lake Union Publishing (out now)
Fruit of the Devil by Mary Flodin
Ms. Aurora Bourne would do anything to protect her students from harm … even if that means going up against the most powerful corporation on the planet.
While getting her fourth grade classroom ready for Fall, Aurora begins to feel sick, and it’s more than back-to-school blues. Outside her windows next to the playground, strawberry fields have just been fumigated and pesticides are drifting into the classrooms, causing serious health issues for children and adults.
When the teenage sister of a migrant student goes missing from the strawberry fields, it becomes clear that pesticide poisoning isn’t the only thing threatening the children’s safety, and Aurora begins to understand why farmworkers call strawberries Fruta del Diablo — the Fruit of the Devil.
Aurora starts asking questions and gets caught in a web of gangs, drugs, trafficking, and high-level corporate crime. When a Catholic priest comes to her aid, she falls in love with him, complicating her life further. She has no idea he’s actually an ancient nature god out of Pacific Coast indigenous legends.
Categories: contemporary adult fiction, ecothriller, romance
Published by Paper Angel Press (out now)
Land Marks: A Novel by Maryann Lesert
In the river-crossed northwoods of Michigan, Kate, Brett, Sonya, and Mark, mentored by their former professor Rebecca, keep watch as North American Energy (NorA) connects a corridor of frack well sites deep in the state forests. When NorA expands in unexpected directions and a bigger plan becomes clear, the action begins.
As grassroots activists prepare to stop NorA’s dangerous superfrac, stresses other than the fracturing of the bedrock appear. Sonya is arrested, Rebecca reveals her hidden past, and the one person who knows both women’s stories arrives in camp. Love and solidarity want to win, even if most showdowns with Big Oil don’t end well for those who take a stand.
Land Marks is a tribute to the waterways that connect us, the land that sustains us, and the moments that inspire us to rise up and say, “No more!”
Categories: contemporary adult fiction, eco-fiction, feminist, place-based, literature of resistance
Published by She Writes Press (April 2024)
La Vieja: A Journal of Fire by Deena Metzger
When the Writer began to receive “inexplicable communications” from La Vieja, she knew very little about her. Over time, it became clear that the old woman was a seer, seemingly real, but spirit-like, who had taken permanent residence in a fire lookout tower in the Sierras of California. Her watch there took on a great significance in this time of climate destruction, pandemic, and the possibility of the extinction of the natural world. There, La Vieja’s senses began to sharpen, turning toward a greater connection with the intelligence of the natural world, including the bears and the surrounding trees. Two other characters emerged from this contact: Lucas, a doctor who also loves to retreat to a little-used fire tower, and Léonie, a librarian/stonemason who has a lifelong dreaming connection to the Bears. The two meet and fall in love, and retreat to a similar forest world as their story becomes entwined with the world of La Vieja in an overlapping of realities. Part dream, part real, part memoir, Metzger’s La Vieja blurs the boundaries between human consciousness and animal consciousness, of imagination and reality, to create a “Journal of Fire,” a recording of the process of living with the constant threat of the destruction of the natural world. And yet, it finds hope by making new connections that lead us toward a liberation from human domination, toward renewal and a vision of the future where humans and the natural world are integral parts of a whole, intermingling and interdependent, where human nature and animal nature are inclusive of each other.
Categories: Literary fiction, environmental
Published by Hand to Hand Publishers (out now)
Blaze Island by Catherine Bush
For those who loved Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behavior comes a new climate-themed, Shakespeare-inspired novel from bestselling author Catherine Bush.
The time is now or an alternate near now, the world close to our own. A mammoth Category Five hurricane sweeps up the eastern seaboard of North America, leaving devastation in its wake, its outer wings brushing over tiny Blaze Island in the North Atlantic.
Just as the storm disrupts the present, it stirs up the past: Miranda’s memories of growing up in an isolated, wind-swept cove and the events of long ago that her father will not allow her to speak of. In the aftermath of the storm, she finds herself in a world altered so quickly and so radically that she hardly knows what has happened. As Miranda says, change is clear after it happens.
Categories: magical realism
Published by Goose Lane Editions (out now)
A Spy in the Struggle by Aya de León
Success used to be this savvy lawyer’s only rule. But now she’s putting everything on the line to bring a killer corporation to justice.
Since childhood, Yolanda Vance has forged her desire to escape poverty into a laser-like focus that took her through prep school and Harvard Law. So when her prestigious New York law firm is raided by the FBI, Yolanda turns in her corrupt bosses to save her career—and goes to work for the Bureau. Soon she’s sent undercover at Red, Black, and Green—an African-American “extremist” activist group back in her California college town. They claim a biotech corporation fueled by Pentagon funding is exploiting the neighborhood. But Yolanda is determined to put this assignment in her win column, head back to corporate law, and regain her comfortable life…
Until an unexpected romance opens her heart—and a suspicious death opens her eyes. Menacing dark money forces will do anything to bury Yolanda and the movement. Fueled by memories of who she once was—and what once really mattered most—how can she tell those who’ve come to trust her that she’s been spying? As the stakes escalate, and one misstep could cost her life, Yolanda will have to choose between betraying the cause of her people or invoking the wrath of the country’s most powerful law enforcement agency.
Categories: Mystery, Thriller
Published by Kensington Books (out now)
Waiting for the Night Song by Julie Carrick Dalton
Cadie Kessler has spent decades trying to cover up one truth. One moment. But deep down, didn’t she always know her secret would surface?
An urgent message from her long-estranged best friend Daniela Garcia brings Cadie, now a forestry researcher, back to her childhood home. There, Cadie and Daniela are forced to face a dark secret that ended both their idyllic childhood bond and the magical summer that takes up more space in Cadie’s memory then all her other years combined.
Now grown up, bound by long-held oaths, and faced with truths she does not wish to see, Cadie must decide what she is willing to sacrifice to protect the people and the forest she loves, as drought, foreclosures, and wildfire spark tensions between displaced migrant farm workers and locals.
Waiting for the Night Song is a love song to the natural beauty around us, a call to fight for what we believe in, and a reminder that the truth will always rise.
Categories: Contemporary, Mystery, Drama, Thriller
Published by Forge (out now)
Categories: Adult Contemporary Fiction, Climate Fiction, Disaster Fiction, Adult Fiction
Published by Green Writers Press (October 1st, 2024)
ARROYO CIRCLE starts with wildfires, filling Boulder, Colorado with smoke, as Shelley, a white, middle-aged handmaiden to a hoarder is violently confronted by police who believe she put a baby in the trunk of her car. Shelley winds up in the legal system, and in her absence the hoarder’s house and occupants burn to the ground. Unemployable, Shelley rents out her home and is forced to sleep in an unheated garage. Les, an alcoholic, shape-shifting scientist, lives in the creek bed behind her house and helps her navigate this new world, even as Covid sweeps through town. With a strange mix of quantum physics, Buddhism, and Tito’s, Les teaches her about the healing powers of nature and the deeper meanings of home. Into their midst comes a dazed walker who is more closely connected to Shelley than she can imagine. When the warm Chinook winds blow through the mountains and melt the heavy snows, everyone, including the police, has one last shot at redemption.
Back to the Garden by Clara Hume
Clara Hume’s speculative ecofiction, Back to the Garden, is told from the perspective of a group of “tipping point” survivors–a generation of mountain folks who have experienced the collapse of late-stage capitalism, along with widespread ecosystem degradation due to climate change. It is within the framework of a unique time, when these characters live through two worlds, vastly different from one another, that they tell their tales, a way of documenting their journeys in life.
While the friends and family in this novel struggle to survive, and overcome personal losses and grief, they do so with the strength of character that allows people to gracefully succeed during times of societal failure. They understand that true riches of life come from the great outdoors and from their relationships with each other. They learn to survive and adapt to a climate-changed world. Part “road” novel, part survival tale, and part romance, this literary novel looks into the human psyche as people similar to how we imagine ourselves find hope in the face of disaster.
Back to the Garden presents a frightening and tragic possibility for our future but doesn’t ignore our affirmative connection to the wilderness and to other people. The novel attempts to open people’s eyes to the importance of respecting limits, before it’s too late.
Categories: Speculative fiction, friendship, family
Published by Dragonfly Publishing (out now)
Climate Fiction Writers League 