Here are 67 books that Migrations fans have personally recommended if you like
Migrations.
Book DNA is a community of 13,000+ authors and super readers sharing their favorite books with the world.
I have zero expertise in the climbing world, but I do love to hike and trek in the mountains and just generally be outside in the wilderness or on the water. I’ve hiked up Mount Washington and in New Hampshire, lots of trails in Yosemite and Oregon, and farther afield in Japan, Patagonia, and Nepal. One of the things I love most is how everything falls away when you’re hiking, for example. The calls and emails you’ve yet to return, bills you haven’t paid, issues with your husband or neighbor or a painful conversation with your mom, none of it matters. It’s just you and whatever you’re surrounded by in the moment.
This book is beautifully written and one of my favorites. It’s about a woman’s marriage, infidelity, and hardship in a foreign setting that ultimately brings about self-knowledge and awareness. Written in the 1920s, it might seem too old to be relatable, but I’ve read it several times and find it incredibly incisive and real.
The protagonist, Kitty, goes through a massive transformation, and by the end, I’m always impressed by how brave she is, and how smart. It’s a different kind of grappling with the past in this novel—here, it’s about facing what you thought you wanted, who you were in the past, and wanting to change--maybe not so different after all!
'She did not know what to say. She was undecided whether indignantly to assert her innocence or to break out into angry reproaches. He seemed to read her thoughts. "I've got all the proof necessary" '
Kitty Fane is the beautiful but shallow wife of Walter, a bacteriologist stationed in Hong Kong. Unsatisfied by her marriage, she starts an affair with Charles Townsend, a man whom she finds charming, attractive and exciting. But when Walter discovers her deception, he exacts a strange but terrible vengeance: Kitty must accompany him to his new posting in remote mainland China, where a cholera…
The Gatepost is a new speculative novel that will appeal to readers of Susanna Clarke, Emily St. John Mandel, David Mitchell, Richard Powers, and R.F. Kuang.
Featuring a hidden cave, psilocybin mushrooms, and a mysterious ancient artifact that may act as a portal to the Mesoamerican underworld, The Gatepost blends…
In today’s world, where negativity and dire situations can easily bombard us, I need to consistently ground myself in hope and light. Real stories about transformation and unconditional love are not only uplifting and hopeful, they are also around every corner. Every one of us is capable of transformation and the giving and receiving of unconditional love. It’s through transformation and unconditional love that we may better understand what it means to be human and, thus, build our capacity for compassion for one another. Through compassion, we can create a better world.
Strayed’s personal transformation through nature and challenge is what I loved in this memoir.
Wild starts off in crisis. The gritty detail throughout doesn’t shy away from the depths of human experience like grief, addiction, and loss (of unconditional love). The narrator has an incredible plan to get herself out of the mess of her current life. Could she do it?
I love a story of someone who is lost, in despair, and goes on a mission to change herself through a connection with nature. Wild delivers. Strayed’s writing brilliantly weaves together her journey in nature with her backstory of how she came to crisis.
This memoir made me fall in love with California’s topography all over again.
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A powerful, blazingly honest memoir: the story of an eleven-hundred-mile solo hike that broke down a young woman reeling from catastrophe—and built her back up again.
At twenty-two, Cheryl Strayed thought she had lost everything. In the wake of her mother’s death, her family scattered and her own marriage was soon destroyed. Four years later, with nothing more to lose, she made the most impulsive decision of her life. With no experience or training, driven only by blind will, she would hike more than a thousand miles of the Pacific Crest Trail from the…
When I was nine, my family kayaked 100 miles on the Yukon River. Each night from my sleeping bag, I heard wolves howling, and each day we saw moose, grizzly bears, and even a fur-clad trapper. I was utterly enchanted by the wilderness and the experience of moving through the landscape silently, without disturbing the wildlife. I have never shaken the awestruck feeling of seeing those animals, free in their ample territory, and my work as a writer has remained entwined with wild nature and the far north ever since. I am deeply inspired by women writers who approach these subjects with reverence, passion, and unique perspectives.
This chronicle of arctic life and landscape enchanted me from the beginning.
Here is the true story of Christiane Ritter, an Austrian painter with no outdoor experience who travels to the remote northern coast of Svalbard to spend the winter of 1933-34 with her scientist husband.
Ritter’s frank voice and wry humor drew me right in; at first, she’s hilariously unimpressed by the pack ice and endless snow! But soon she’s deeply transformed by the same things that inspire me to write about the far north: the land’s vast scale, the aurora borealis, arctic foxes, and night skies brimming with stars.
A few weeks into winter’s polar night she describes herself as “moonstruck” and the following rapturous chapters kept me breathlessly reading until the end.
"Conjures the rasp of the skin runner, the scent of burning blubber and the rippling iridescence of the Northern Lights..." Sara Wheeler, author of Terra Incognita: Travels in Antarctica
"Ritter manages to articulate all the terrible beauty and elemental power of a polar winter" Gavin Francis, author of Empire Antarctica
In 1934, the painter Christiane Ritter leaves her comfortable life in Austria and travels to the remote Arctic island of Spitsbergen, to spend a year there with her husband. She thinks it will be a relaxing trip, a chance to "read thick books in the remote quiet and, not least,…
The Gatepost is a new speculative novel that will appeal to readers of Susanna Clarke, Emily St. John Mandel, David Mitchell, Richard Powers, and R.F. Kuang.
Featuring a hidden cave, psilocybin mushrooms, and a mysterious ancient artifact that may act as a portal to the Mesoamerican underworld, The Gatepost blends…
Science is still assumed to be a ‘male’ subject in which women are a minority. I should know—I was one of those women when I worked as an astrophysicist. But there have always been women in science and their stories are fascinating, whether told in nonfiction or in fiction. Fiction is ideally placed to convey the emotions behind the scientific processes and the way in which human interactions and relationships influence what happens in the lab.
A novel that is partly based on the real-life anthropologist Margaret Mead and her work in New Guinea in the 1930s, this book had me gripped from the start as it evoked the complex dynamics between the three main characters and their very different approaches to studying Indigenous people.
I was in awe of the power of story-telling in this short book. It shows us how anthropologists might hope to be impartial observers of the people they study, but in reality, these encounters change everyone.
From the author of Writers & Lovers, Euphoria is Lily King's gripping novel inspired by the true story of a woman who changed the way we understand our world.
'Pretty much perfect' - Curtis Sittenfeld, author of Rodham
In 1933 three young, gifted anthropologists are thrown together in the jungle of New Guinea. They are Nell Stone, fascinating, magnetic and famous for her controversial work studying South Pacific tribes, her intelligent and aggressive husband Fen, and Andrew Bankson, who stumbles into the lives of this strange couple and becomes totally enthralled. Within months…
I consider myself a topologist of story, ever fascinated by the shapes stories take, and how those underlying forms—as much as their specific content—guide our reactions and our emotions. In a social-media-saturated age, it’s more important than ever that we practice the skills of comprehending story landscapes so that we can understand who benefits from them—and who doesn’t. Ditch the GPS: whether memoir, reportage, or fiction, these books showcase some of the map-and-compass skills we all need to navigate a complicated new era.
During a group summer vacation on a beachy East Coast hideaway, the age-old dynamics of young vs. old—and the have-a-lots vs. the have-less—are in full play. The result sounds like any number of 20th-century American literary dramas, until it becomes clear that the disasters that loom are far larger than any single-family or community. Millet’s playful, snarky novel is a portrayal of what may come as the young realize how thoroughly older generations have sold out their future. The adults may be lost, but the kids are alright.
Pulitzer Prize finalist Lydia Millet's sublime new novel-her first since the National Book Award-longlisted Sweet Lamb of Heaven- follows a group of eerily mature children on a forced vacation with their parents at a lakeside mansion. Contemptuous of their elders, who pass their days in a hedonistic stupor, the children are driven out into a chaotic landscape after a great storm descends. The story's narrator, Eve, devotes herself to the safety of her beloved little brother as events around them begin to mimic scenes from his cherished picture Bible.
Millet, praised as "unnervingly talented" (San Francisco Chronicle), has produced…
I grew up in Uganda and Kenya, and when I moved to the United States, I felt separated from myself. Learning how to be American was exhausting and so I disappeared into books. I’m now more settled, but I still travel through fiction. These days, I am reading fiction by African women. You should be, too! There is so much stunning literature out there. These five books are just the beginning, but they are novels I can’t stop thinking about.
What does environmental racism look like? ReadHow Beautiful We Wereby Imobolo Mbue for a vital, searing answer. An American oil company is destroying the land and water of the fictional village of Kosawa. Children are dying. The company does this because they can, spouting only empty words about restitution. The novel narrates the village’s fight back, using alternating points of view to electric, pulsing effect.
'Sweeping and quietly devastating' New York Times 'A David and Goliath story for our times' O, the Oprah Magazine
Set in the fictional African village of Kosawa, this is the story of a people living in fear amidst environmental degradation wrought by an American oil company. Pipeline spills have rendered farmlands infertile. Children are dying from drinking toxic water. Promises of clean-up and financial reparations are made - and broken. Left with few choices, the people of Kosawa decide to fight back. But it will come at a steep price - one which generation after generation…
I’m a science communicator turned fiction writer with a special interest in the impact of environmental crises on small towns and overlooked places. My short fiction has appeared in various journals, including The Fiddlehead, Nimrod, Barren, and Reckon Review. I’m currently writing a novel about hurricane chasers along the Gulf Coast.
This speculative dystopia about drought-ruined California is equal parts lyrical gut-punch and surrealist adventure story. Main characters Luz and Ray set up residence in an abandoned celebrity mansion, subsisting on whatever they can scavenge. Their precarious existence is upended when they cross paths with a toddler, and the trio sets off into the Dune Sea in search of a life that offers more than mere survival. A warning: this is not a cool breeze of a read. But if you’re curious about the psychic impact of prolonged heat, thirst, and desperation, Watkins offers a masterclass on the grimy reality of human resilience in a hostile world of our own making.
Haunting and beautifully written first novel by the award-winning author of Battleborn, set among a cult of survivors in a dystopian American desert
'A Mad Max world painted with a finer brush' Elle
'An unforgettable journey into a hauntingly imagined near-future' Ruth Ozeki
'Set in a drought-ravaged Southern California trolled by scavengers, Gold Fame Citrus burns with a dizzying, scorching genius' Vanity Fair
Desert sands have laid waste to the south-west of America. Las Vegas is buried. California - and anyone still there - is stranded. Any way out is severely restricted. But Luz and Ray are not leaving. They…
I’m a science communicator turned fiction writer with a special interest in the impact of environmental crises on small towns and overlooked places. My short fiction has appeared in various journals, including The Fiddlehead, Nimrod, Barren, and Reckon Review. I’m currently writing a novel about hurricane chasers along the Gulf Coast.
This remixing of the American legend of Johnny Appleseed with climate science, ecoterrorism, and elements of Roman mythology results in a very big book — literally. At almost 500 pages, there’s a lot of, well, everything. But at its organic core, this is a story about the preservation of our most basic and necessary elements. As the story moves further into the distant future, the fight to protect the scraps and slivers of non-robotic life becomes more focused as it does urgent. By the end, what emerges is the gnawing sense that perhaps the mythology we’ve constructed around technology as our salvation is inhibiting the mysterious yet ultimately more powerful magic of a natural world quite capable of re-propagating itself if only we humans could bring ourselves to stand aside.
A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK · A PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER BEST OF THE YEAR
“Woven together out of the strands of myth, science fiction, and ecological warning, Matt Bell’s Appleseed is as urgent as it is audacious.” —Kelly Link, Pulitzer Prize finalist and national bestselling author of Get in Trouble
A “breathtaking novel of ideas unlike anything you’ve ever read” (Esquire) from Young Lions Fiction Award–finalist Matt Bell, a breakout book that explores climate change, manifest destiny, humanity’s unchecked exploitation of natural resources, and the small but powerful magic contained within every single apple.
Although I grew up in New York City, from a young age I was drawn to the natural world, particularly through gardening and camping trips. Eventually I studied biology in college and earned a Master’s researching stream ecology. I also always imagined myself a writer. For years my writing was solely in letters and journals, but during my Master’s I started a novel featuring an immature mayfly in the stream (it was somewhat autobiographical). Ecology is all about the connection of organisms to their environment and to one another, and I think this perspective of connectedness has embedded itself deeply in my writing and my life.
First of all, this sprawling novel is funny and entertaining, and those qualities would be reason enough that I would recommend it. Yet beyond those qualities, it created a strong sense of place and a real social and political conflict without ever becoming preachy or heavy handed—not an easy feat as I have learned.
The storyline, a conflict over land use and water rights, is repeated again and again throughout the West and Southwest in particular—in this case pitting real estate developers against impoverished locals. But the story is also about a conflict of cultures and how those cultures perceive and connect to the land. Exposing such conflicts is a boon of literature.
The Milagro Beanfield War is the first book in John Nichols's New Mexico Trilogy (“Gentle, funny, transcendent.” ―The New York Times Book Review)
Joe Mondragon, a feisty hustler with a talent for trouble, slammed his battered pickup to a stop, tugged on his gumboots, and marched into the arid patch of ground. Carefully (and also illegally), he tapped into the main irrigation channel. And so began-though few knew it at the time-the Milagro beanfield war. But like everything else in the dirt-poor town of Milagro, it would be a patchwork war, fought more by tactical retreats than by battlefield victories.…
When I was nine, my family kayaked 100 miles on the Yukon River. Each night from my sleeping bag, I heard wolves howling, and each day we saw moose, grizzly bears, and even a fur-clad trapper. I was utterly enchanted by the wilderness and the experience of moving through the landscape silently, without disturbing the wildlife. I have never shaken the awestruck feeling of seeing those animals, free in their ample territory, and my work as a writer has remained entwined with wild nature and the far north ever since. I am deeply inspired by women writers who approach these subjects with reverence, passion, and unique perspectives.
As a writer obsessed with folklore and magical realist fiction, I adore this book!
Based loosely on the Russian fairy tale of the same name, The Snow Child is set in 1920s Alaska and balances the ethereal arrival of a magical child with the harsh reality faced by homesteaders in an unforgiving landscape. My favorite elements in this book are also primary themes I aspire to in my own writing: characters who face hardship with grit, perseverance, and a deep connection to their wild home.
The author was born and raised in Alaska, and you can tell by the detail and specificity in her writing. In this novel, the natural world truly is the main character, to breathtaking effect.
A bewitching tale of heartbreak and hope set in 1920s Alaska, Eowyn Ivey's THE SNOW CHILD was a top ten bestseller in hardback and paperback, and went on to be a Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.
Alaska, the 1920s. Jack and Mabel have staked everything on a fresh start in a remote homestead, but the wilderness is a stark place, and Mabel is haunted by the baby she lost many years before. When a little girl appears mysteriously on their land, each is filled with wonder, but also foreboding: is she what she seems, and can they find room in…
