11 best new nature books of 2024
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Whether your surroundings are urban or rural, populated or remote, the best way to appreciate the natural world is to head outdoors. But that said, reading about nature always trains my eye to look a little closer: at the trees I pass when walking through the park, at the sea on trips up the Danish coast, or up at the surprisingly clear night sky here in Copenhagen.
Including beautifully written nature memoirs, nature-focused poetry collections, some fiction, and other hidden gems, these are some of the best new books about nature for 2024 that I’ve come across so far.
These books have inspired me to spend more time outdoors, understand more of what I see, and remember to appreciate the joys of life lived close to nature. Pour a cup of tea and enjoy browsing these stunning new literary forays into our natural world…
More like this to read next: 9 beautiful new coffee table books for 2024
The best new nature books to read in 2024
The Serviceberry: An Economy of Gifts and Abundance by Robin Wall Kimmerer
One of the best-known and loved nature books of the last decade is Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass. Her new book for 2024, The Serviceberry, looks just as wise and tenderly powerful, focused on the serviceberry – or Bozakmin, meaning “the best of the berries” in the Potawatomi language. Quite wonderfully, the “min” part of the word is the root for both “berry” and “gift”.
With tenderness and appreciation, The Serviceberry explores the ethics of reciprocity, interconnectedness, and gratitude as we interact with nature, offering a manifesto for mutual flourishing as an antidote to selfish individualism. As Robin Wall Kimmerer illustrates, a gift economy stands in contrast with the financial economy of scarcity, competition, and hoarding that we’re used to.
At just 128 pages, The Serviceberry is sure to be a petite but powerful read. While you wait for publication on 19 November 2024, you can enjoy Robin’s essay for Emergence Magazine that inspired it, available with her own beautiful narration. As Robin writes in the piece,
“To replenish the possibility of mutual flourishing, for birds and berries and people, we need an economy that shares the gifts of the Earth, following the lead of our oldest teachers, the plants.”
The Backyard Bird Chronicles by Amy Tan
“In distress, I found refuge in nature,” says Amy Tan (The Joy Luck Club) about The Backyard Bird Chronicles, a beautifully illustrated and reflective narration of her search for calm and resilience outside her window.
It turns out that Amy Tan isn’t just an excellent writer, but also a skilled illustrator. As Amy explains in the book, she started nature journaling lessons at age 65 to acknowledge her childhood dreams of becoming an artist.
With meditative inquisitiveness, Amy accompanies each sketch of a visiting bird with ponderings on its life. As she reclaims her curiosity, imagination, and place for healing, she also kindles our own wonder and quiet attention, too.
The Light Eaters: The New Science of Plant Intelligence by Zoë Schlanger
One of my metrics for deciding which books to add to this collection is the question: is it fascinating? For The Light Eaters, the answer is indisputably yes. Described by Robin Wall Kimmerer as “a masterpiece of science writing,” it’s one of the most absorbing books I’ve read in a long time, taking a tour of the long-disputed arena of plant intelligence and its latest developments.
Did you know that ferns don’t have seeds, but rather sperm that travels via the moist forest floor? Or that they can sabotage competing ferns’ reproductive quality? Without anthropomorphizing, The Atlantic science writer Zoë Schlanger considers plants as they are: mesmerizing, full of surprises, and very much intelligent in their own way.
Ingrained: The Making of a Craftsman by Callum Robinson
“All I can see is possibility…” writes Callum Robinson as he recalls sifting through a selection of “rich, golden oak” that can endure for centuries, “ghostly, almost luminescent sycamore,” and other offerings from nature’s towering, leafy canopy.
Ingrained is full of exceptionally intricate details of craftsmanship, as well as its beautiful crossover with nature and the people behind it. You have to love (or at least be intrigued by) trees and carpentry to pick this up, but if you do, it’s a real gem.
As Callum, the son of a master woodworker, and his partner Marisa (a “disillusioned architectural designer”) joined forces to dedicate their energy to “creating remarkable things,” they built Method Studio. Their journey is a marvellous tribute to both creative work and nature’s slow growth and interconnectivity.
The Place of Tides by James Rebanks
You might know James Rebanks from his memoirs of life on a Lake District farm (English Pastoral, The Shepherd’s Life), or his partner Helen’s equally excellent The Farmer’s Wife. The Place of Tides, published in October 2024, travels across the North Sea to a remote Norwegian island, where one afternoon many years ago James Rebanks met an old woman who lived and worked alone, caring for wild Eider ducks and gathering their down.
Rebanks couldn’t stop thinking about the woman on this tiny rocky outcrop, so he wrote her a letter to ask if he could return. She agreed, but told him to hurry – with good boots and work clothes – as her health was failing. The Place of Tides narrates Rebanks’s time back in the northern wilds, witnessing this remarkable woman’s last season on the island.
We Will Not Be Saved: A memoir of hope and resistance in the Amazon rainforest by Nemonte Nenquimo
We Will Not Be Saved describes itself as a “memoir of hope and resistance in the Amazon rainforest,” but it’s also a stunningly written paean to nature’s force and beauty – and a plea to protect it.
Behind the book (also called We Will Be Jaguars in some editions) is a fascinating author I didn’t know nearly enough about: Nemonte Nenquimo, one of the most forceful voices in climate activism, who grew up in the Waorani tribe in Ecuador’s Amazon rainforest.
In her story of nature, people, and the inextricable bond between them, Nemonte shares her early years learning plant medicine, foraging, oral storytelling, and shamanism, before leaving the forest to study with an evangelical missionary group in the city.
However, when the voices of her ancestors plead with her to return to her native forest, she heeds the call. If everyone could read this book, our world would reap so many benefits.
Storm Pegs: A Life Made in Shetland by Jen Hadfield
“This book is my ‘where am I?’ “ writes poet Jen Hadfield in Storm Pegs, her stunning memoir of life in Shetland. She continues: “It’s a foolhardy venture, but at least it’s honest. Like jumping off the side of a boat to swim in da mareel at night, I have no idea of the depth of the water.”
After moving to Shetland in her late twenties, Jen Hadfield has spent the last seventeen years living in the remote scattering of islands in northernmost Scotland, a place that couldn’t feel further from most of the United Kingdom.
Her new book is a wonderfully atmospheric nature memoir, evoking the stormy weather, close-knit community, and wild nature on the beautiful archipelago that Hadfield has made her home.
Ebb and Flow: A Guide to Seasonal Living by Tiffany Francis-Baker
Tiffany Francis-Baker writes beautifully about the natural world (you might know Dark Skies or The Cottage Life), and her new book for 2024, Ebb and Flow, is similarly cozy, restful, and full of cottagecore vibes. Her nature-inspired illustrations are also a delight.
Described as “a guide to seasonal living,” Ebb and Flow celebrates the wonder of reconnecting with the seasons and blends practical science-backed advice with lessons from the Pagan ‘Wheel of the Year’. If you want to inspire a more slow, mindful life in tune with nature’s rhythms, Ebb and Flow is an excellent port of call.
You Are Here: Poetry in the Natural World – edited by Ada Limón
Although it contains many gorgeous poems, the best part of You Are Here might be the excellent introduction by Ada Limón, the twenty-fourth Poet Laureate of the United States. Echoing W.S. Merwin’s pledge that “On the last day of the world, I would want to plant a tree,” Limón reminds us that even in uncertain and unpredictable times,
“there is more time to plant trees, to write poems, to not just be in wonder at this planet, but to offer something back to it, to offer something back together.”
As Limón reminds us, “Nature is not a place to visit. Nature is who we are.” The poems are curated beautifully, bringing together diverse voices that bear witness to our past, express concern for the future, and propose ways to live with care, attention, and love.
One of my favourite lines in the collection: “For me, the sun / has always been easy to love” (Aimee Nezhukumatathil in “Heliophilia”). Later, Camille T. Dungy recalls the verdant joy of a honeymoon hike near Drakes Bay, California: “Here I am. So much in bloom! / And me, with you, in all this soft wild buzzing.”
The final poem of the collection, “Reasons to Live” by Lebanese American poet Ruth Awad, rejoices the moment when “the bearded irises will form / fully in their roots, their golden manes / swaying with the want of spring – / live, live, live live!–”
The Underworld: Journeys to the Depths of the Ocean by Susan Casey
Although The Underworld was published in 2023, I think it’s one of the best non-fiction books of the last few years. (And after only just reading it, I want any excuse to talk about it.)
Susan Casey dives deep, deep down into the oceans – through the twilight zone, the midnight zone and the abyssal zone, all the way down to the otherworldly Hadalpelagic Zone (up to 36,000 feet deep) where you’ll find the Mariana Trench off the coast of Japan.
The Underworld is also a perfect companion read to Richard Powers’s new novel Playground (just published in September 2024), which I also couldn’t resist adding to this list…
Playground by Richard Powers
“The fate of continents is written in water…” Recently longlisted for the Booker Prize 2024, Playground is perhaps Richard Powers’s most similar book to his Pulitzer-winning The Overstory – it just sings a song of oceans instead of trees. It’s also exceptional.
The writing in Playground is wonderous and fiercly imaginative, travelling from Illinois to French Polynesia and weaving together reality with the constructions of artificial intelligence. You’ll read about more ocean species than you likely knew existed (“Lemonpeels, flame angels, Picasso triggerfish: the colours were like an acid trip”) and gain a new perspective on ocean’s majesty and precariousness.
Rafi and Todd, who bond over the ancient Chinese game of Go at an elite Chicago school, are both fascinatingly intelligent and flawed in different ways, but the most intriguing character for me was Evelyne Beaulieu, a French Canadian oceanographer whose biography draws on the life of Dr. Sylvia Earle. In the acknowledgements, Richard Powers has also cited Helen Czerski’s The Blue Machine and Other Minds by Peter Godfrey-Smith as inspiration.
Other honourable mentions:
- The Garden Against Time by Olivia Laing: An enchanting memoir of gardens and our place within them for anyone who’s dreamed of a garden utopia of their own.
- Sharks Don’t Sink: Adventures of a Rogue Shark Scientist by Jasmin Graham: One young Black scientist’s uplifting story of independently researching nature’s most misunderstood animal.
- Anima: A Wild Pastoral by Kapka Kassabova: The author’s fascinating story of her time with the last moving pastoralists in Europe.
- Chasing Fog: Finding Enchantment in a Cloud by Laura Pashby: A dreamlike and spellbinding exploration of fog from the author of Little Stories of Your Life.
- Dispersals: On Plants, Borders, and Belonging by Jessica J. Lee: A poetic and vibrant book of linked essays that explore the entangled lives of plants and humans.
- Bothy: In Search of Simple Shelter by Kat Hill: A mindful appreciation of Scotland’s shelters in nature, selected for the Wainwright Prize longlist 2024.
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