A professor named Cristina Rivera Garza stumbles upon the corpse of a mutilated man in a dark alley and reports it to the police. When shown a crime scene photo, she finds a stark warning written in tiny print with coral nail polish on the brick wall beside the body: “Beware of me, my love / beware of the silent woman in the desert.”

Now with a new introduction by Robert Macfarlane and a new afterword by Jenny Odell, this masterpiece of nature writing by Nan Shepherd describes her journeys into “the high and holy places” of the Cairngorm Mountains of Scotland. There she encounters a world of spectacular cliffs, deep silences, and lakes so clear that they cannot be imagined. As she walks through clouds, endures blizzards, and watches the great spirals of eagles in flight, Shepherd comes to know something about the hidden life of this remarkable landscape—and also herself.

Burnt out and in need of retreat, a middle-aged woman leaves Sydney to return to the place she grew up, taking refuge in a small religious community hidden away on the stark plains of rural Australia. She doesn't believe in God, or know what prayer is, and finds herself living this strange, reclusive existence almost by accident.

At a Ph.D. program in Southern California, Sarah and her best friend, Nathan, spend their time working on their theses, getting high, and keeping track of the poor air quality due to nearby forest fires. No one believes Sarah when she reports a fellow student for raping her at a party—“He’s such a good guy!”—and the Title IX office simply files away the information, just like the police. Nathan is the only person who cares. When Sarah finds Nathan dead of an overdose from a drug he’s always avoided, she knows something isn’t right.

In the heart of the Maine woods, an experienced Appalachian Trail hiker goes missing. She is forty-two-year-old Valerie Gillis, who has vanished 200 miles from her final destination. Alone in the wilderness, Valerie pours her thoughts into fractured, poetic letters to her mother as she battles the elements and struggles to keep hoping. At the heart of the investigation is Beverly, the determined Maine State Game Warden tasked with finding Valerie, who leads the search on the ground.

Doctor Jack Troy was born and raised in Faha, but his responsibilities for the sick and his care for the dying mean he has always been set apart from the town. His eldest daughter, Ronnie, has grown up in her father’s shadow, and remains there, having missed one chance at love – and passed up another offer of marriage from an unsuitable man. But in the Advent season of 1962, as the town readies itself for Christmas, Ronnie and Doctor Troy’s lives are turned upside down when a baby is left in their care.

When Helen MacDonald's father died suddenly on a London street, she was devastated. An experienced falconer captivated by hawks since childhood, she'd never before been tempted to train one of the most vicious predators: the goshawk. But in her grief, she saw that the goshawk's fierce and feral anger mirrored her own.

Early in her career, Elaine Pagels changed our understanding of the origins of Christianity with her work in The Gnostic Gospels. Now, in the culmination of a decades-long career, she explores the biggest subject of all, Jesus. In Miracles and Wonder she sets out to discover how a poor young Jewish man inspired a religion that shaped the world.

In 2019, author John Green met Henry Reider, a young tuberculosis patient at Lakka Government Hospital in Sierra Leone. John be­came fast friends with Henry, a boy with spindly legs and a big, goofy smile. In the years since that first visit to Lakka, Green has become a vocal advocate for increased access to treatment and wider awareness of the healthcare inequi­ties that allow this curable, preventable infec­tious disease to also be the deadliest, killing over a million people every year. In Everything Is Tuberculosis, John tells Henry’s story.

Four older women have a lifelong friendship of the best kind: loving, practical, frank, and steadfast. But when Sylvie dies, the ground shifts dangerously for the remaining three. They are Jude, a once-famous restaurateur; Wendy, an acclaimed public intellectual; and Adele, a renowned actress now mostly out of work. Struggling to recall exactly why they’ve remained close all these years, the grieving women gather at Sylvie’s old beach house - not for festivities this time, but to clean it out before it is sold. Can they survive together without her?

In January 1945, in the waning months of World War II, a small group of people begin the longest journey of their lives: An attempt to cross the remnants of the Third Reich, from Warsaw to the Rhine if necessary, to reach the British and American lines. As they work their way west, they encounter a countryside ravaged by war. Their flight will test both Anna’s and Callum’s love, as well as their friendship with Manfred - assuming any of them even survive.

Yiyun Li’s remarkable, defiant work of radical acceptance as she considers the loss of her son James. Things in Nature Merely Grow is a testament to Li’s indomitable spirit.

From the titular story about a married woman who takes a trip to the city with a single purpose in mind—to sleep with another man—Antarctica draws listeners into a world of obsession, betrayal, and fragile relationships. Cordelia wakes on the last day of the twentieth century and sets off to keep a date nine years in the waiting. Frank Corso mourns the curious disappearance of his daughter and tries desperately to reach out to his shattered wife. Throughout the collection, Keegan's characters inhabit a world where dreams, memory, and chance can have crippling consequences.

Nikki Serafino is enjoying the sunset from her boat in her beloved port city of Naples, Italy, when she discovers the body of a man in the warm waters of the bay. An investigator working as the liaison between local police and American troops, Nikki is certainly no stranger to violence and organized crime, but this case grows complicated when the victim turns out to be a U.S. Navy captain stationed at the nearby military base—and the autopsy reveals foul play.

Franny Stone has always been the kind of woman who is able to love but unable to stay. Leaving behind everything but her research gear, she arrives in Greenland with a singular purpose: to follow the last Arctic terns in the world on what might be their final migration to Antarctica. Franny talks her way onto a fishing boat, and she and the crew set sail, traveling ever further from shore and safety. But as Franny’s history begins to unspool - a passionate love affair, an absent family, a devastating crime - it becomes clear that she is chasing more than just the birds.

When Catherine Raven finished her PhD in biology, she built herself a tiny cottage on an isolated plot of land in Montana. She was as emotionally isolated as she was physically, but she viewed the house as a way station, a temporary rest stop where she could gather her nerves and fill out applications for what she hoped would be a real job that would help her fit into society. In the meantime, she taught remotely and led field classes in nearby Yellowstone National Park. Then one day she realized that a mangy-looking fox was showing up on her property every afternoon at 4:15 p.m.

The first of our organs to form and the last to die, the heart is both a simple pump and the symbol of what makes us human; as long as it continues to beat, there is hope. In The Story of a Heart, Dr. Rachel Clarke interweaves the history of medical innovations behind transplant surgery with the story of two children—one of whom desperately needs a new heart.

Born in Sweden in 1964, Neneh Cherry’s father Ahmadu was a musician from Sierra Leone. Her mother, Moki, was a twenty-one-year-old Swedish textile artist. Her parents split up just after Neneh was born, and not long afterwards Moki met and fell in love with acclaimed jazz musician Don Cherry. Eventually, the strong pull New York City in the 1970s drew him them there, but they made a home wherever they traveled. Neneh and her brother Eagle-Eye experienced a life of creativity, freedom, and, of course, music.

Offering innovative ideas for protecting coastlines and cleaning the toxic seas, Scales insists we need more ethical and sustainable fisheries and must prevent the other existential threat of deep-sea mining, which could significantly alter life on earth. Inspiring us all to maintain a sense of awe and wonder at the majesty beneath the waves, she urges us to fight for the better future that still exists for the Anthropocene ocean.

Burnt out and in need of retreat, a middle-aged woman leaves Sydney to return to the place she grew up, taking refuge in a small religious community hidden away on the stark plains of rural Australia. She doesn't believe in God, or know what prayer is, and finds herself living this strange, reclusive existence almost by accident.

Martha S. Jones grew up feeling her Black identity was obvious to all who saw her. But weeks into college, a Black Studies classmate challenged Jones’s right to speak. Suspicious of the color of her skin and the texture of her hair, he confronted her with a question that inspired a lifetime of introspection: “Who do you think you are?” Now a prizewinning scholar of Black history, Jones delves into her family’s past for answers. In every generation since her great-great-great-grandmother survived enslavement to raise a free family, color determined her ancestors’ lives.

After leaving behind the routines of work life, Kevin Ryan sets out on a 4,000-mile journey by bicycle across America to discover who he is after a fulfilling and busy career. From the charming small towns of New England to the vast, rugged landscapes of the Rocky Mountains, this inspiring memoir captures not only the physical adventure but also the deeper, more personal quest for a renewed sense of purpose.

Now with a new introduction by Robert Macfarlane and a new afterword by Jenny Odell, this masterpiece of nature writing by Nan Shepherd describes her journeys into “the high and holy places” of the Cairngorm Mountains of Scotland. There she encounters a world of spectacular cliffs, deep silences, and lakes so clear that they cannot be imagined. As she walks through clouds, endures blizzards, and watches the great spirals of eagles in flight, Shepherd comes to know something about the hidden life of this remarkable landscape—and also herself.

During World War II, Elzbieta Zawacka—the WWII female resistance fighter known as Agent Zo—was the only woman to reach London as an emissary of the Polish Home Army command. In Britain, she became the only woman to join the Polish elite Special Forces, known as the "Silent Unseen." She was secretly trained in the British countryside, and then she was the only female member of these forces to be parachuted back behind enemy lines to Nazi-occupied Poland.

In 1974, the Supreme Court issued a momentous decision: In the case of Milliken v. Bradley, the justices brought a halt to school desegregation across the North, and to the civil rights movement’s struggle for a truly equal education for all. How did this come about, and why? In The Containment, the esteemed legal scholar Michelle Adams tells the epic story of the struggle to integrate Detroit schools—and what happened when it collided with Nixon-appointed justices committed to a judicial counterrevolution.

On a cool summer evening in 1977, Mayumi Inaba hears a forlorn cry carried by the breeze of Tokyo’s Tamagawa River. She follows the sound to find a newborn kitten, just the size of her palm, dangling from a fence, abandoned. Overcome by tender affection, she takes the cat back to the small apartment she shares with her husband and christens her Mii, and so begins an ineffable bond.

Robert Macfarlane brings his glittering style to a profound work of travel writing, reportage, and natural history. Is a River Alive? is a joyful, mind-expanding exploration of an ancient, urgent idea: that rivers are living beings who should be recognized as such in imagination and law. Macfarlane takes listeners on three unforgettable journeys teeming with extraordinary people, stories, and places: to the miraculous cloud-forests and mountain streams of Ecuador, to the wounded creeks and lagoons of India, and to the spectacular wild rivers of Canada.

Teenaged István lives with his mother in a quiet apartment complex in Hungary. Shy and new in town, he is a stranger to the social rituals practiced by his classmates and soon becomes isolated, with his neighbor—a married woman close to his mother’s age, whom he begrudgingly helps with errands—as his only companion. But as these periodical encounters shift into a clandestine relationship that István himself can barely understand, his life soon spirals out of control, ending in a violent accident that leaves a man dead.

In the heart of the Maine woods, an experienced Appalachian Trail hiker goes missing. She is forty-two-year-old Valerie Gillis, who has vanished 200 miles from her final destination. Alone in the wilderness, Valerie pours her thoughts into fractured, poetic letters to her mother as she battles the elements and struggles to keep hoping. At the heart of the investigation is Beverly, the determined Maine State Game Warden tasked with finding Valerie, who leads the search on the ground.

Celebrated author and artist A. Kendra Greene’s No Less Strange or Wonderful is a brilliant and generous meditation—on the complex wonder of being alive, on how to pay attention to even the tiniest (sometimes strangest) details that glitter with insight, whimsy, and deep humanity, if only we’d really look. In twenty-six sparkling essays, Greene is trying to make sense—of anything, really—but especially the things that matter most in life: love, connection, death, grief, the universe, meaning, nothingness, and everythingness.