Back Bay Books

Wallace Nichols compiles the neuroscience research on why water makes people feel better — calmer, more creative, more connected. The science is real. The writing occasionally drifts toward self-help, but the core argument is compelling: we are hardwired for water.

Abbey's sequel to The Monkey Wrench Gang — more sabotage, more desert, more defiance. Written in the last year of his life and published posthumously. Not as tight as the original, but animated by the same furious love of the land.

Childs at his most extreme — solo desert travel in the canyonlands of the Southwest, sleeping in alcoves, following water through slot canyons where no water should be. The landscape is the character; the human is just passing through.

A comic novel about a young fly-fishing obsessive in the Pacific Northwest who retreats to a cabin on an Oregon river and discovers that catching fish isn't the same as understanding them. The funniest serious fishing novel ever written.

This Pulitzer Prize finalist feels like winter—wet snowflakes on eyelashes, the smell of a woodstove, fear of long, dark nights. Inspired by an old Russian folk tale, it’s a fictional story about a novice homesteading couple in 1920s Alaska who are unprepared for the frontier’s harsh demands. One day on a whim they build a childlike snowman; overnight the snowman vanishes, and a mysterious little girl appears from the woods. She is skittish around people yet sure-footed as a mountain goat in the snow, trapping animals for food with a wily red fox as her hunting companion. Named after alpenglow, she is fearlessly at home in the very wilderness that threatens the homesteaders. Where is she from, and why does she disappear at night? Is she a fairy tale come to life? The Snow Child shifts between the fantastical and the real, an immersive, haunting fable about finding hope in wildness that stays wild.

In 1885, shortly after the Alaska Purchase from Russia and before the gold rush, the U.S. Army’s Lieutenant Henry T. Allen was ordered on a 1,200-mile expedition to map the Copper and Tanana rivers of Alaska’s interior. Little was known about the uncharted region at the time, other than frightening legends and a few true tales of previous adventurers who never returned. To the Bright Edge of the World, a novel by Pulitzer Prize finalist Eowyn Ivey, reimagines the journey through fictionalized newspaper clippings, letters, and vintage art and photos, navigating the reader back and forth from actual history to the realm of magical realism. As she carefully reconstructs the wilderness of the late 19th century northern frontier, Ivey also twists the usual Western expedition narrative with a leading female character and an emphasis on First Nations culture. Suspenseful, absorbing, and at times darkly mythical, this is a book made for winter cabin reading.