An ENTHRALLING new novel from the NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLING author of Migrations and Once There Were Wolves. A family on a remote island. A mysterious woman washed ashore. A rising storm on the horizon.
Dominic Salt and his three children are caretakers of Shearwater, a tiny island not far from Antarctica. Home to the world’s largest seed bank, Shearwater was once full of researchers, but with sea levels rising, the Salts are now its final inhabitants. Until, during the worst storm the island has ever seen, a woman mysteriously washes ashore.
I have read in some truly remote places. I have sat by a stream in a Patagonian valley, after half of a nine-hour horseback ride, a gigantic hare hopping out of the bushes, a glacier looming high over my head, as I consumed Rebecca Solnit’s words. I have read halfway up a (small) mountain in Glencoe, a rainbow forming below me in the valley, heather and sheep painting the hillsides. I have read resting on the roots of a 1,200-year-old redwood and on a boat ferrying me out further into the Great Barrier Reef.
One of the great ironies of books is that they make you feel not alone, and yet they are capable, through their subjects or themes, of evoking deep isolation and disconnection; and making you feel it, too. Our protagonists enter remote landscapes, from the Alaskan brush to the wide open ocean, from a cut-off town to a wide-open mountain plain prone to lightning strikes. There, they are reduced to something animal that simply needs to survive; and yet they are also yearning, reaching, for a human connection.
Some find that connection in other things, from animals to religion; some leave (when it’s possible) to less remote places; some try to fill the gap with simply the gritty soil of surviving. These books set in remote places are compelling texts because they evoke so much of what makes us human, from our animal ability to survive at all costs to our desperate need for fellow humanity or connection.
The Mercies by Kiran Millwood Hargrave
In 1617 (the book is based on real events), a freak storm killed almost all the men of Vardø, Norway, while they were out on the ocean fishing. The women of the isolated, bleak seaside town were forced to rise to the occasion and surpass gender roles and grief to survive, coming together to row, hunt, fish, and more. But then Absalom Cornet comes to town, set on rooting out any heresy or subversion he can find, from local Indigenous customs to the newfound independence of the local women.
The Vaster Wilds by Lauren Groff
A servant girl flees famine-struck Jamestown to try to get to an imagined northern settlement. She strikes out into an American wilderness that she is totally unfamiliar with, still unexplored by European people. She knows so little about nature, but a lot about survival; using her instincts and sheer desperation to survive, she carves out shelter, food, and hope. As she wanders through the forest and encounters bears, people, and other dangers, she reflects on the ways she’s been wronged in her life and tries to find a place for her faith in God in this new, unfamiliar landscape.
The Far Field by Madhuri Vijay
After Shalini’s mother dies by suicide, she feels the need to do something, anything, and decides to go in secret to rural Kashmir in the hope of tracking down a man who used to visit her mother. His name is Bashir Ahmed. But to find him, Shalini has to enter a world that isn’t hers: a remote, rural life haunted by the violence of military clash and occupation. When things get too real, Shalini’s privilege and inability to truly understand local conflicts and prejudices risk causing real damage to the people around her.
Moon of the Crusted Snow by Waubgeshig Rice
A small Anishinaabe community in Canada has become increasingly modernized, relying on local imports for food, power, and more. So when everything goes dark, only a select few are prepared for the kind of resource-sharing, conservation, and active hunting and gathering that will get the town through the sharp, dangerous northern winter. This book is a narrowly banded dystopian novel all about practical survival in the midst of other humans, and the ability (or inability) of communities to band together rather than turn on one another in moments of true crisis.
The Last Quarter of the Moon by Chi Zijian, translated by Bruce Humes
For my historical fiction lovers, a book about the Evenki, a nomadic, reindeer-herding people who live in the forests of northeastern China and parts of Russia. Our unnamed narrator shares with us a story of their lives: the deaths, births, and loves they face. She also writes of the intrusions of the world outside—the Japanese occupy China, the draft reaches the nations, and civilization destroys forests and mountains. This is a rich, compelling story about an Indigenous community.
When I Sing, Mountains Dance by Irene Solà, translated by Mara Faye Lethem
Life in the Pyrenees has a dozen unexpected perils. One of these is lightning: poet and farmer Domènec is struck high up on a mountain ridge, and from there the story unspools. It’s a story of his two children growing up, of his wife (who never wanted a remote country life), and of the mountains themselves. Everything from the black chanterelles on the ridge to a roe deer, from the land itself to the ghosts who haunt it, narrates a single story. This is just 200 pages, but it’s a rich story of wide-open, remote landscape and the people who seek connection in it.
Black Woods, Blue Sky by Eowyn Ivey
Birdie is a mess, but she’s trying to keep it together for her daughter Emaleen. When she falls for the reclusive, tough Arthur, she can’t help following him for the winter despite all the reservations and warnings of the people around them. She and Emaleen move to his mountain cabin, reachable only by a combination of a small plane ride and hiking, and fall into a life of foraging and the outdoors. But soon, something dark descends on them both, and Birdie begins to wonder whether bringing her young daughter to this remote place was really the right thing to do in this fable-like novel by the author of The Snow Child.
Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia
What’s more remote than a manor in a gothic novel? Noemí goes out to High Place in order to check on her cousin, a newlywed who wrote Noemí a worrisome letter begging for someone to help her. What she finds there is troubling: the house is seemingly haunted, the patriarch is quietly overbearing, and her cousin’s husband is menacing—but her cousin seems to not want help anymore. As Noemí tries to dig deeper, using her sharp wit and determination, she starts to uncover a dark foundation of secrets and violence under this isolated mansion.
Life of Pi by Yann Martel
This book has quickly become a modern classic. A young Tamil boy is traveling with his family and the animals of their zoo when their ship is wrecked. Pi ends up in a lifeboat with only a zebra, hyena, orangutan, and most dangerously, a tiger named Richard Parker. Even while starving, the two strike a nervous acceptance, and begin a long and perilous story of adventure, absurdity, and fierce determination to survive. This book is a beautiful tale of what a human will do to survive, the stories we tell ourselves to stay whole, with an ending that always makes me wish I could read it for the first time all over again.
For more books like this, check out Kathleen Keanan’s list of books set off the beaten path, or Emily Stochl’s list of books set in transporting places!
