Little, Brown and Company

Zack Klein's collection of photographs of cabins, shelters, and hideaways in wild places around the world. No text to speak of — just image after image of small structures in big landscapes. The architectural equivalent of a deep breath.

Craig Childs on the ethics of taking artifacts from the wild. Who owns a thousand-year-old pot found in a Utah canyon? The museum? The government? The Pueblo descendants? Nobody? Childs doesn't answer the question so much as make you feel the weight of it.

Craig Childs follows the trail of the Ancestral Puebloans across the desert — from Chaco Canyon to the Mogollon Rim — looking for evidence of where they went when they left. Part archaeology, part desert travel, part detective story about a civilization that didn't vanish so much as disperse.

Childs on the animals he's encountered in the wild — mountain lions, grizzlies, ravens, rattlesnakes. Each essay is a close encounter rendered with the intensity of someone who gets closer than most people dare.

The book’s title refers to a region along the Arizona-Mexico border that’s so hot, bleak, and unforgiving that even Border Patrol agents generally keep their distance. It’s here, in May 2001, that coyotes guide over two-dozen immigrants hoping to launch a better life into the United States—and it’s here that more than half of them die. Urrea’s gripping, Pulitzer Prize-nominated telling manages to humanize an issue that’s long been a political lightning rod.

A literary thriller set in the Alps — two climbers on the Eiger Nordwand, decades of secrets, and a fall that echoes through time. Mawer writes climbing with the precision of someone who understands both the rock and the psychology.

A 4,000-mile human-powered journey from the Pacific Northwest to the Arctic, by bike, ski, foot, and packraft. Van Hemert is a biologist, and the journey is also an act of attention to the ecosystems she crosses.

Childs lost his home and his marriage and walked into the Grand Canyon in winter. A book about hitting bottom in the most literal landscape for it. Raw, unsparing, and ultimately about the possibility of starting over.