Take a look at our top mixed-genre nature and wildlife themed fiction books for adults, free to borrow with your library card. Includes sci-fi, dystopian, thriller and horror titles.
Find out more about our Wild Reads programme and explore our suggested books for wildlife enthusiasts of all ages.
Station Eleven
Emily St. John Mandel
One snowy night in Toronto famous actor Arthur Leander dies on stage whilst performing the role of a lifetime. That same evening a deadly virus touches down in North America. The world will never be the same again.
Twenty years later Kirsten, an actress in the Travelling Symphony, performs Shakespeare in the settlements that have grown up since the collapse. But then her newly hopeful world is threatened.
If civilization was lost, what would you preserve? And how far would you go to protect it?
Moving backwards and forwards in time, from the glittering years just before the collapse to the strange and altered world that exists 20 years after, ‘Station Eleven’ charts the unexpected twists of fate that connect six people.
Annihilation
Jeff VanderMeer
For 30 years, Area X has remained mysterious, remote, and concealed by the government as an environmental disaster zone – even though it is to all appearances pristine wilderness.
Over the same period, a secret agency known as the Southern Reach has monitored it and sent in expeditions to try to discover the truth. Some have suffered terrible consequences. Others have reported nothing out of the ordinary.
Now, as Area X seems to be changing and perhaps expanding, the next expedition will attempt to succeed where all others have failed. What is happening in Area X, and what is the true nature of the invisible border that surrounds it?
Smothermoss
Alisa Alering
1980s Appalachia. Sheila knows she needs to keep her appetites in check. Isolated and struggling in ramshackle poverty, her desires – for food, for escape, for the perfect girls in the pages of her pilfered magazines – are about the only things she can control.
But with every passing day, life with her exhausted mother and her half-feral younger sister Angie feels more like a rope tightening around her neck.
When a pair of hikers are brutally murdered on the trail, Sheila and Angie find themselves drawn inexorably into the hunt for the killer. The mountain they live on is ancient and powerful – and it’s using them for its own ends.
Sheila knows the landscape’s folklore is dangerous and unpredictable, but as the ever-present threat of violence looms larger, it might be the only thing that can save her and her sister from the darkness consuming their home…
The New Wilderness
Diane Cook
Bea’s five-year-old daughter, Agnes, is slowly wasting away. The smog and pollution of the overdeveloped, overpopulated metropolis they call home is ravaging her lungs. Bea knows she cannot stay in the City, but there is only one alternative: The Wilderness State.
Mankind has never been allowed to venture into this vast expanse of untamed land. Until now. Bea and Agnes join eighteen other volunteers who agree to take part in a radical experiment. They must slowly learn how to live in the unpredictable, often dangerous Wilderness, leaving no trace on their surroundings in their quest to survive.
But as Agnes embraces this new existence, Bea realises that saving her daughter’s life might mean losing her in ways she hadn’t foreseen.
The Road
Cormac McCarthy
The landscape is destroyed. Nothing moves save the ash on the wind. Cruel, lawless men stalk the roadside, lying in wait.
Attempting to survive in this brave new world, the young boy and his protector have nothing but a pistol to defend themselves. They must keep walking.
In this unflinching study of the best and worst of humankind, Cormac McCarthy boldly divines a future without hope, but one in which, miraculously, this young family may yet find tenderness.
The God of the Woods
Liz Moore
Some said it was tragic, what happened to the Van Laars. Some said the Van Laars deserved it. That they never even thanked the searchers who stayed out for five nights in the freezing forest trying to help find their missing son.
Some said there was a reason it took the family so long to call for help. That they knew what happened to the boy.
Now, fifteen years later, their daughter has gone missing in the same wilderness as her brother. Some say the two disappearances aren’t connected. Some say they are.
Heartwood
Amity Gaige
In the heart of the Maine woods, an experienced Appalachian Trail hiker goes missing. She is forty-two-year-old Valerie Gillis, who has vanished 200 miles from her final destination.
Alone in the wilderness, Valerie pours her thoughts into fractured, poetic letters to her mother as she battles the elements and struggles to keep hoping.
At the centre of the search is Beverly, the determined Maine State Game Warden tasked with finding Valerie, who managing the search on the ground. While Beverly is searching, Lena, a seventy-six-year-old birdwatcher in a retirement community, becomes an unexpected armchair detective.
Roving between these compelling narratives, a puzzle emerges, intensifying the frantic search, as Valerie’s disappearance may not be accidental.
Wielki Samotny
Kristin Hannah
Cora Allbright and her husband Ernt – a recently-returned Vietnam veteran scarred by the war – uproot their 13-year-old daughter, Leni, to start a new life in Alaska.
Utterly unprepared for the weather and the isolation, but welcomed by the close-knit community, they fight to build a home in this harsh, beautiful wilderness.
At once an epic story of human survival and love, and an intimate portrait of a family tested beyond endurance, ‘The Great Alone’ offers a glimpse into a vanishing way of life in America.
The Overstory
Richard Powers
Nine strangers, each in different ways, become summoned by trees, brought together in a last stand to save the continent’s few remaining acres of virgin forest.
‘The Overstory’ unfolds in concentric rings of interlocking fable, ranging from antebellum New York to the late-20th-century Timber Wars of the Pacific Northwest and beyond, revealing a world alongside our own – vast, slow, resourceful, magnificently inventive, and almost invisible to us.
This is the story of a handful of people who learn how to see that world, and who are drawn up into its unfolding catastrophe.
The Expanded Earth
Mikey Please
One sunny Sunday, without warning, humankind is reduced to the height of a handspan – an unsightly transformation as potentially fatal as it is inconvenient. On a remote coastal path, Giles awakes in his new body to discover a world reshaped and magnified into a place of astounding abundance and deadly peril.
Desperate to reconnect with his loved ones, he seeks the help of fellow survivors, and together they embark on a quest across the altered landscape. But as their journey unfolds, the more the question persists – are they still truly human, or has their reduction in size marked the beginning of a descent into savagery, an evolution into something other?
Elsewhere, one week earlier, Professor Elizabeth Goodwin makes a monumental discovery – God is alive and physically among us, but not in the form we’ve been taught to expect.
What the Forest Devours
Elaine Vilar Madruga
Benedicta has given birth, over and over. But she will never be a mother.
Benedicta lives with her mother, her sister and her many children on a hacienda surrounded by dense rainforest. The jungle is a hungry god: it allows them to live safely away from a ruthless world of guerrillas and drug traffickers, but at a terrible price. Its voracity is never-ending, and those who live under its control must offer up their children in a sacrificial cycle powered by blood and madness.
One day Romina, a pregnant sex worker from the nearest town, emerges from the rainforest. Will she be the one to break the cycle? Brutal, powerful and deeply unsettling, this Caribbean gothic fable about motherhood and the female body is a truly unique and unforgettable novel, from a writer at the peak of her powers.
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