Tag Archive for: love

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The Joyful Environmentalist | Isabel Losada

The Joyful Environmentalist is very much an XR book, with two chapters describing the April Rebellion from the position of the XR Samba band. The rest is about all the ways in which we can change our lives to support our planet.

Dr Rowan Williams writes of it: “Perhaps the most important message any environmentalist can give at the moment is that green options are neither just a last desperate hope for saving the planet, nor misery maximisers that will make life less worth living.  They are ways of affirming that worthwhileness and enhancing it. This book, practical and realistic as well as visionary, will keep that positive message before the reader’s eyes.  Joy is after all one of the best motivations we can have for change.”

Every Leaf a Hallelujah | Ben Okri

Every Leaf a Hallelujah - Ben Okra

Mangoshi lives with her mum and dad in a village near the forest. When her mum becomes ill, Mangoshi knows only one thing can help her – a special flower that grows deep in the forest. The little girl needs all her courage when she sets out alone to find and bring back the flower, and all her kindness to overpower the dangers she encounters on the quest. Ben Okri brings the power of his mystic vision to a timely story that weaves together wonder, adventure and environmentalism.

 

Read our Librarian’s top climate choices for children here.

The Devil’s Highway | Gregory Norminton

The Devil’s Highway is the folk name for a Roman road in north Surrey. The name is rooted in superstition, for in the Dark Ages, it must have seemed that only the devil could build anything so straight and strong. The Roman road marks the beginning of written history, of a civilisation that destroys in the name of progress. Physically and metaphorically, the Devil’s Highway runs through the interlinked narratives that make up the novel.

Set in the unforgiving sandy ‘wastes’ of Bagshot Heath, the three sections of The Devil’s Highway consist of three agons, or battles, against our self-destructive nature. In ‘Blueface’, an ancient British boy discovers a terrorist plot in which his own family is implicated. In ‘No Man’s Land’, two twenty-first century people – one traumatised by war, another by divorce – clash over the use and meaning of a landscape. Finally, in the futuristic ‘The Heave’ (where language is as degraded as the planet), a gang of feral children struggles to reach safety in a time of war.

Three narratives, one location, combine in a novel that spans centuries and challenges our dearest assumptions about civilisation. Combining elements of historical and speculative fiction with the narrative drive of pure thriller, The Devil’s Highway is an epic tale of love, loss, fanaticism, heroism and sacrifice.

“A brilliant deep-time meditation on how landscapes hold – and conceal – meanings.”~ Robert Macfarlane

“The best treatment of climate change in fiction I’ve come across. A powerful, essential novel.” ~ George Monbiot

 

Read more of our Climate Classics: timeless works exploring themes of climate change and biodiversity loss.

Postcolonial Love Poem | Natalie Diaz

Postcolonial Love Poem is a thunderous river of a book. It demands that every body carried in its pages – bodies of language, land, suffering brothers, enemies and lovers – be touched and held. Where the bodies of indigenous, Latinx, black and brown women are simultaneously the body politic and the body ecstatic. In claiming this autonomy of desire, language is pushed to its dark edges, the astonishing dune fields and forests where pleasure and love are both grief and joy, violence and sensuality.

Diaz defies the conditions from which she writes, a nation whose creation predicated the diminishment and ultimate erasure
of bodies like hers and the people she loves. Her poetry questions what kind of future we might create, built from the choices we make now.