Harper

Peter Hessler drove across China in a rented car, following the Great Wall, watching a village industrialize, and navigating a country reinventing itself at highway speed. The third book in his China trilogy, and the one most about landscape and what happens to it when money arrives.

Two years teaching English in a small city on the Yangtze during China's transformation. The river rises, the city changes, and the outsider watches with the precision of someone who knows he's seeing something that won't last.

Many dream of the camping trip that never ends. Surely our best selves are found in nature, right? In Diane Cook’s novel The New Wilderness, a mother saves her daughter from pollution-induced asthma by moving to the Wilderness State, an experimental preserve where a small group of volunteers live nomadically as hunter-gatherers. The air is clean, the water runs clear, and the night sky sparkles. There’s also a Manual, capital M, a sort of Leave No Trace set of rules to keep the Wilderness State pristine, and Rangers for reinforcement. All effort is toward survival; when a person dies—from a cougar mauling, river crossing, or simply being left behind due to injury—there are no funerals. As years go by, the utopian vision oozes into disturbing desperation. Fans of Ursula K. Le Guin and Margaret Atwood will love this dark, all-too-real story of our relationship with nature and each other.