(These are excerpts—click on the title to view the whole piece!)
 

Ann Skea reviews...
 

The Buried Life
by Andrea Goldsmith

The Buried Life is not as predictable as it initially seems, and there are no contrived romantic endings. Andrea Goldsmith writes compellingly and creates an intricate, absorbing, thoughtful, and enjoyable novel.
 

The Dream of a Tree
by Maja Lunde, translated by Diane Oatley

The Dream of the Tree relies mostly on Tommy's memories, which bring to life the land and its people and the struggles he and they endure living in a place where half the year is spent in darkness, and where landslides and avalanches are a constant threat. The Svalbard people are proud of their self-sufficiency and the community they have established. They have learned to use, repair, and recycle everything, to rely on coal, wind, and solar power, and to use the wild animals and the vast greenhouse sustainably for food.
 

Orbital
by Samantha Harvey

The crew like the metaphor of Shaun as the soul of the spaceship; meticulous philosophical Pietro (Italian) its mind; Anton, (the emotional Russian) its heart; dexterous Roman its hands; undefinable Chie, its conscience; and Nell ("with her eight-litre diving lungs') its breath. Each of them will spend about nine months on this space-station.
 

The Thinning
by Inga Simpson

That we are already losing this astronomical dark to light pollution, and that nature is already disrupted by this, is the book's underlying warning, but Inga Simpson is too good a writer to be didactic. Instead, she weaves a tale that draws you into the drama of Fin's journey and the fragile beauty of the rugged land through which she treks.
 

Exit Wounds
by Peter Godwin

Flying against the wind seems to be what Godwin has done for most of his life, but home, for him, is still Rhodesia, which is, as Jim Moore says, in a poem he quotes, "a country that no longer exists."
 

Darkenbloom
by Eva Menasse, translated by Charlotte Collins

All this is upsetting the people of Darkenbloom, who do not want their history dug up. Nobody talks about the war, curtains twitch, people watch each other... "the walls have ears, the flowers in the gardens have eyes... and the grass has whiskers that register every step." There are many dark secrets. Some of its men had belonged to the Nazi Youth and still meet in the Hotel Tuffer to discuss the old days. Flocke's mother, Leonore, who married into Darkenbloom, calls it a town "full of Nazis, liars, and drunkards."
 

The Many Lives of James Lovelock: Science, Secrets and Gaia Theory
by Jonathan Watts

It was the novelist William Golding who suggested the name "Gaia" to Lovelock, telling him of the Greek Goddess of the Earth—the powerful, sometimes terrifying mother of all life. Watts doubts whether Gaia would have become so well-know if Lovelock had continued to refer to his theory as describing "a cybernetic biological system or a biologically controlled homeostatic system." "Gaia," as Lovelock liked to say, was "a good four-letter word."