August though it is, there’s still at least one good book left of summer. So this month’s post offers 12 possible choices for your final summer read: six non-fiction and six fiction.
The six non-fiction titles include a collection of essays by the best-selling New Yorker writer Elizabeth Kolbert, an artful and stirring new book about birds, a visit — through the contributions of artists, critics, and curators — to a museum exhibition about “Whales and Weather,” a good news history of Los Angeles, an “epic journey” through the resource landscapes of extraction, and a disturbingly timely rewrite of a history of fire in Europe.
The six fiction titles are organized and presented geographically. Each book connects with climate change in a different way and often in a different genre. There’s a thriller set in New England, a heist story that begins and ends in New York City, and a magical-realist novel set in Nebraska during the Dust Bowl. Then the tales move to New Orleans & Texas, New Mexico (actually, this one is belles lettres), and California. Pick the part of the country where you want to spend your last month of summer!
As always, the descriptions of the titles are adapted from copy provided by their publishers. When two dates of publication are listed, the second is for the paperback edition. If you purchase a book through one of the links below, a percentage of the proceeds funds our journalism.
Life on a Little-Known Planet: Dispatches from a Changing World by Elizabeth Kolbert (Crown 2025, 320 pages, $32.00)
An intrepid reporter and a skillful translator of scientific ideas, Kolbert expertly captures the wonders of nature and paints vivid portraits of the researchers and concerned citizens working to preserve them. She takes readers all around the globe, from an island in Denmark that’s succeeded in going carbon neutral to a community in Florida that voted to give rights to waterways. We meet a biologist who believes we can talk to whales, an entomologist tracking rare caterpillars before they disappear, and a climatologist who’s considered the “father of global warming.” The threats to our planet that Kolbert has devoted so much effort to exposing have only grown more serious. We need to deepen our understanding of the world we are in danger of losing.
The Book of Birds: A Field Guide to Wonder and Loss by Robert Macfarlane and Jacki Morris (W.W. Norton 2026, 384 pages, $35.00)
The Book of Birds is a field guide with a difference: It shows readers not just how to identify birds, but also how to identify with them. Robert Macfarlane and Jackie Morris conjure the unique spirit of nearly fifty once-common species: avocet to yellow-hammer, kestrel to kingfisher, skylark to nightingale. In lyrical and incantatory essays, Macfarlane describes each bird’s habits and habitats, their patterns of flight and song, how they hunt or fish or scavenge or gather, how they nest and raise their chicks — and how their lives intersect with our own. On every page we encounter Morris’s exhilarating artwork, painted from life in watercolor and gold leaf, and animated with extraordinary detail. The Book of Birds is a love letter to the thrilling variety and mysteries of birdlife, and a call to halt the rapid depletion of our skies.
Weather and the Whale, edited by Rachel Nelson, Alexandra Moore, and Ari Friedlander (University of Minnesota 2026, 304 pages, $34.95 paperback)
Weather and the Whale is a unique exhibition catalog, combining artworks, critical and creative texts, and new scientific research about whales to both sound a warning of the irreversible consequences of the collapsing climate and offer alternative possibilities for living during these challenging times. Collaboratively organized by the Institute of the Arts and Sciences and the Friedlaender Bio-Telemetry and Behavioral Ecology Lab at UC Santa Cruz, this catalog is the result of a two-year working group of artists, scientists, and other scholars. Weather and the Whale raises fundamental questions about knowledge, power, multispecies relationships, and the responsibilities — and limits — of science in addressing the climate crisis. It also highlights the collective practices and ways of knowing necessary to create a more healthy and just world.
Smog and Sunshine: The Surprising Story of How Los Angeles Cleaned Up Its Air by Ann Carlson (University of California Press 2026, 312 pages, $26.95)
Los Angeles and smog have been synonymous for decades. From the 1940s through the 1980s, children breathed air so heavy with lead that their blood was poisoned with it. In 1970, officials declared smog alerts on 235 days. But the last smog alert happened in 2003, and lead has virtually disappeared from the air. This is the story of how Los Angeles cleaned up its air. In Smog and Sunshine, environmental law expert and LA native Ann Carlson recounts the dramatic policy fights and the determined scientists, lawyers, and community members who worked alongside public officials to face off against major polluters and save their city. In a time of unprecedented climate change and skepticism about government and science, this book is an inspiring reminder of what concerned residents, individual leaders, and government can achieve together.
The Vanishing Earth: Dispatches from the Frontiers of Extraction by James Crawford (Bloomsbury Publishing 2026, 448 pages, $32)
Over the last half-century, humanity has taken more from the Earth than in all prior history combined. The planet is littered with the vast scars of extraction – yet it is only by confronting the ruins of our ‘old’ world that we can find the path towards the ‘new’. In The Vanishing Earth, James Crawford, born into a landscape and family steeped in fossil fuels, takes readers to the frontiers of extraction, embarking on an epic journey to five resource landscapes trending towards exhaustion: landscapes of rock, metal, sand, water and thought. From the salt flats of Chile’s Atacama Desert lithium mines to the ‘sacrifice zone’ of Florida’s phosphorus-rich Bone Valley, Crawford explores some of the most extreme scenes of the Anthropocene. What lies behind our insatiable appetites? he asks, and what might transform our relationship with nature itself?
Undying Fire: A Fire History of Europe by Stephen J. Pyne (University of Washington Press 2026, 342 pages, $34.95 paperback)
This work offers a sweeping history of Europe told through flame. Tracking millennia of human-made fire, Pyne reveals a relationship in which Europe’s elites sought to keep fire a servant, ever more tightly controlled. The transition to a fossil-fueled modernity, however, led to a paradox in which Europe lost its mastery as land use, climate, and flame turned feral and the Earth pivoted toward a Pyrocene in which humanity’s binge burning created a fire age to rival the ice ages. The result is both a lucid synthesis and a provocation: what Europe’s global expansion set into motion has returned to kindle a resurgence of wildfire across the continent, starkly visible in the heat-dome summers of the 2020s. As tool, ecological process, threat, and symbol, fire illuminates Europe’s past —and its environmental futures.
Nonfiction travels
New England
The Scallop Plot: A Cape Cod Thriller by Judy Foreman (She Writes Press 2026, 272 pages, $17,95 paperback) New England
In Provincetown, Massachusetts, scallop fisherwoman Isabella Ferreira goes up against wind developer Olaf Svensson, who wants to install wind turbines in the ocean right off the coast of Cape Cod. At a nearby scallop hatchery, marine biologists Leif and Astrid Borgen are using the new gene-editing technique CRISPR to insert a growth hormone gene into scallop embryos to make them bigger and thus more profitable. But Svensson is also paying the pair to insert a gene that causes PSP, paralytic shellfish poisoning. If this works, no one will ever eat scallops from this site again, freeing it for turbines. Enter Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Samantha Fuller. Together with Isabella, she slowly uncovers Svensson’s deadly plot — but not before hundreds die. Along the way, the subtleties of the pro- and anti-wind power groups are exposed.
New York City and beyond
Cloudthief: A Novel by Nathaniel Rich (Macmillan 2026, 304 pages, $28.00)
Tim is a climate journalist disillusioned with chronicling the end of the world. Virginia is an evasive, paranoid, and technologically savvy con artist who has found an ingenious way to live off the grid in the heart of Manhattan. Joined by desire and desperation, they hatch a plan to steal secrets. But they have secrets of their own —secrets they can’t tell each other, secrets that could destroy them both. With their last few dollars and some dime-store wigs, they set out for the outskirts of Tulsa, Oklahoma, the unlikely site of a data center the size of a small city, to attempt a brazen heist that, succeed or fail, will change their lives forever. But the heist is only the beginning. From the award-winning author Nathaniel Rich, Cloudthief is a heist novel for a new era, in which the most valuable things in life are virtual and privacy is a joke. What is left?
Nebraska
The Antidote: A Novel by Karen Russell (Knopf/Vintage 2025/2026, 432 pages, $19 paperback)
The Antidote opens on Black Sunday, as a historic dust storm ravages the fictional town of Uz, Nebraska. But Uz is already collapsing — not just under the weight of the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl drought but beneath its own violent histories. The Antidote follows a “Prairie Witch,” whose body serves as a bank vault for peoples’ memories and secrets; a Polish wheat farmer who learns how quickly a hoarded blessing can become a curse; his orphan niece, a basketball star and witch’s apprentice in furious flight from her grief; and a New Deal photographer whose time-traveling camera threatens to reveal both the town’s fate. Russell’s novel is a reckoning with a nation’s forgetting. The Antidote also echoes warnings for our own climate emergency, challenging readers with a vision of what might have been — and what still could be.
New Orleans and Texas
Happy Bad: A Novel by Delaney Nolan (Astra House 2025, 320 pages, $28)
Beatrice works at Twin Bridge, a chronically underfunded residential treatment center in near-future East Texas, teeming with enraged teenage girls on either too many or not enough drugs. On a normal day, it’s difficult for Beatrice and the other staff —Arda, Carmen, and Linda —to keep their cool in dust-blown Askewn. But when a heat wave triggers a massive, sustained blackout, Beatrice and the other staff and residents must evacuate. Facing police brutality, sweltering heat, panicked evacuees, the girls’ mounting withdrawal, and the consequences of her own lies, they search for a route out of the blackout zone. A catastrophe novel by turns tender and hilarious, fueled by a low-simmering political rage, Happy Bad is a rocket arrived on Earth.
New Mexico
The Worst Fishing Dog Ever And Other Essays by Ron Dungan (University of New Mexico Press 2026, 176 pages, $16.95 paperback)
Ron Dungan, like many fly-fishers, can be obsessive. Although decades of fishing trips have led him to encounter snakes, bears, and treacherous terrain, his main focus is always the fish — how to find them, how to outsmart them, and how to hook them. In 27 essays, Dungan takes us on a journey down bad roads and backcountry streams. Each tells a tale about fishing but also about hunting dogs, death, public-land policy, the trap of materialism, and accelerating environmental damage. This last becomes an obsession. Fly-fishing in the arid Southwest has always been precarious, but how has fly-fishing changed, and what further impacts will climate change and resource extraction have? With his dog curled at his feet, Dungan attempts to unravel the tangled line of these hard questions about future challenges fishers will face.
California
More Than Any River: A Novel by (She Writes Press 2026, 272 pages, $17.99 paperback)
Winter 2022-23 inundated California with as much as three times the average rain and snowfall and pulled the state out of one of its biggest droughts in recorded history. But the truth is that the American West, from the Oregon border down to Mexico, is prone to drought — and in California, the biggest battle for water takes place in the Great Central Valley, where south-of-Delta agribusiness controls every stream feeding into the Sacramento and San Joaquin Rivers. The protagonists of More Than Any River are family farmers fighting for the Delta, and the antagonist is big agribusiness. Inspired by true events, this Chinatown-meets–The Grapes of Wrath novel tells the story of California’s Sacramento Delta farmers facing off against agribusiness owners over the water tunnel(s) the state plans to build under prime Delta farmland.
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