Hi! We’re Novellic 👋 New to Substack, but expert book recommenders and book club community-builders since 2020.
Our mobile app is our bread and butter (you can download it here), but we couldn’t resist joining Substack—the coziest, most bookish corner of the internet we’ve found in ages. Here, we’ll be sharing thoughtfully curated collections of books across literary, genre fiction, and non-fiction, tailored for real readers, not algorithms.
So if you’re overwhelmed by BookTok or craving something more personal than endless lists, subscribe for straightforward, genuinely engaging recommendations—handpicked by us, for you. Without further ado… twelve eco-fiction titles in celebration of Earth Month.
🌏 Eco-Fiction & Climate Futures 🌏
Earth Month is in full swing, and so are the stories reckoning with the world as it is — and as it might become. From creeping climate realities to full-blown dystopian futures, these are novels that ask what happens when the ground shifts beneath us. Voices like Richard Powers and C Pam Zhang bring urgency, beauty, and sharp imagination to the crisis at hand.
Consider this your climate-conscious TBR: often unsettling, always thought-provoking, and impossible to look away from.
Parable of the Sower — Octavia E. Butler
We are coming apart. We're a rope, breaking, a single strand at a time.
America is a place of chaos, where violence rules and only the rich and powerful are safe. Lauren Olamina, a young woman with the extraordinary power to feel the pain of others as her own, records everything she sees of this broken world in her journal.
Then, one terrible night, everything alters beyond recognition, and Lauren must make her voice heard for the sake of those she loves. Soon, her vision becomes reality and her dreams of a better way to live gain the power to change humanity forever.
The Overstory — Richard Powers
An artist inherits a hundred years of photographic portraits, all of the same doomed American chestnut. A hard-partying undergraduate in the late 1980s electrocutes herself, dies, and is sent back into life by creatures of air and light. A hearing- and speech-impaired scientist discovers that trees are communicating with one another. An Air Force crewmember in the Vietnam War is shot out of the sky, then saved by falling into a banyan.
This is the story of these and five other strangers, each summoned in different ways by the natural world, who are brought together in a last stand to save it from catastrophe.
Land of Milk and Honey — C Pam Zhang
A smog has spread, food is disappearing, and a chef escapes her career in London to take a job at a decadent mountaintop colony: an experiment in a new way of living and eating. There, her mysterious employer and his visionary daughter have built a lush new life for the global elite, one that reawakens the chef to the pleasures of taste and touch. Before long, she is pushed to discover the real nature of the project: a startling attempt to reshape the world far beyond the place.
Land of Milk and Honey is a striking novel about food, sex and the intricacies of desire.
Greenwood — Michael Christie
Structured like the rings of a tree, this remarkable novel moves from a futuristic world in which only one forest remains to the start of the twentieth century, where two young boys survive a train crash, setting them on a path that will forever change their lives and the lives of those around them.
Flight Behavior — Barbara Kingsolver
On the Appalachian Mountains above her home, a young mother discovers a beautiful and terrible marvel of nature. As the world around her is suddenly transformed by a seeming miracle, can the old certainties they have lived by for centuries remain unchallenged?
Flight Behaviour is a captivating, topical and deeply human story touching on class, poverty and climate change. It explores the truths we live by, and the complexities that lie behind them.
The New Wilderness — Diane Cook
Bea’s daughter, Agnes, is slowly wasting away, her lungs ravaged by the smog and pollution of the overpopulated metropolis they call home.
The only alternative is to build a life in the vast expanse of untamed land known as The Wilderness State. No one has been allowed to venture here before. That is all about to change. But as Bea soon discovers, saving her daughter’s life might mean losing her in ways she hadn’t foreseen.
Passionate and exhilarating, The New Wilderness is the story of a mother’s fight to save her daughter in a world she can no longer call her own.
The High House — Jessie Greengrass
Perched on a hill above a village by the sea, the high house has a mill, a vegetable garden and a barn full of supplies.
Caro and her younger half-brother, Pauly, arrive there one day to find it cared for by Grandy and his granddaughter, Sally. Not quite a family, they learn to live together, and care for one another.
But there are limits even to what the ailing Grandy knows about how to survive, and, if the storm comes, it might not be enough.
How High We Go in the Dark — Sequoia Nagamatsu
Siberia, 2031. After a virus, unearthed from melting permafrost, unleashes a deadly plague upon humanity, those left alive are forced to adapt to a new world, and do so in myriad moving and inventive ways. Among those adjusting to this new normal are an aspiring comedian, employed by a theme park designed for terminally ill children, who falls in love with a mother trying desperately to keep her son alive; a scientist who, having failed to save his own son from the plague, gets a second chance at fatherhood when one of his test subjects — a pig — develops human speech; and a widowed painter and her teenage granddaughter who must set off on cosmic quest to locate a new home planet.
A story of unshakeable hope that seamlessly crosses literary lines, How High We Go in the Dark follows a cast of intricately linked characters spanning hundreds of years as humankind endeavours to restore the delicate balance of the world.
Birnam Wood — Eleanor Catton
Five years ago, Mira Bunting founded a guerrilla gardening group: Birnam Wood. An undeclared, unregulated, sometimes-criminal, sometimes-philanthropic gathering of friends, this activist collective plants crops wherever no one will notice, on the sides of roads, in forgotten parks, and neglected backyards. For years, the group has struggled to break even.
Then Mira stumbles on an answer, a way to finally set the group up for the long term: a landslide has closed the Korowai Pass, cutting off the town of Thorndike. Natural disaster has created an opportunity, a sizable farm seemingly abandoned.
But Mira is not the only one interested in Thorndike. Robert Lemoine, the enigmatic American billionaire, has snatched it up to build his end-times bunker - or so he tells Mira when he catches her on the property. Intrigued by Mira, Birnam Wood, and their entrepreneurial spirit, he suggests they work this land. But can they trust him? And, as their ideals and ideologies are tested, can they trust each other?
Migrations — Charlotte McConaghy
Franny Stone is determined to go to the end of the earth, following the last of the Arctic terns on what may be their final migration to Antarctica. As animal populations plummet, Franny talks her way onto one of the few remaining boats heading south. But as she and the eccentric crew travel further from shore and safety, the dark secrets of Franny's life begin to unspool.
Haunted by love and violence, Franny must confront what she is really running towards - and from. From the west coast of Ireland to Australia and remote Greenland, this is an ode to the wild places and creatures now threatened, and an epic, moving story of the possibility of hope against all odds.
The Light Pirate — Lily Brooks-Dalton
Florida is slipping away. As devastating weather patterns and rising sea levels wreak gradual 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 in search of his children. 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.
Weather — Jenny Offill
An obligatory note of hope, in a world going to hell.
Lizzie Benson, a part-time librarian, is already overwhelmed with the crises of daily life when an old mentor offers her a job answering mail from the listeners of her apocalyptic podcast, Hell and High Water. Soon questions begin pouring in from left-wingers worried about climate change and right-wingers worried about the decline of Western civilization. Entering this polarized world, Lizzie is forced to consider who she is and what she can do to help: as a mother, as a wife, as a sister, and as a citizen of this doomed planet.
We hope you’ve found something that piques your interest! You can shop from and share the whole collection on Bookshop here.
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