Books like Storytelling for a Greener World — picked by fans

This is a book for all who work with people – in other words, it is a book for everyone. It is full of inspiration and practical tools to bring transformation and healing into your daily life, wherever you are. During times of conflict, storytelling dedicated to peace and reconciliation has proven successful in creating a common ground between people of all ages, from different cultures and disparate world views.

The New Story includes more than 30 tales from around the world plus easy-to-do exercises, with contributions from six modern storytellers at work in places like Israel, Kurdistan, and Sierra Leone.

Birds of Heaven is a tiny book full of noble thoughts on why stories and storytelling are integral to our humanity. Okri, the Man Booker Prize author of ‘The Famished Road’, eloquently states ‘The universe began as a story… we are part human, part stories.’

The text contains two inspirational essays on the meaning of language and its power to shape our lives. The work presents an alternative spiritual response to the problems of the present day. It is bursting with beautiful and insightful gems.

If you feel inhibited about making up stories and telling them to children, this is the book for you. Encouraging you to spin golden tales, Nancy Mellon shows how you can become a confident storyteller and enrich your family with the power of story. Children love the unique and human quality of storytelling, and parents and teachers alike can learn this practical, magical art with Nancy’s methods, tips and resources. This book may help give you storytelling wings - even if you didn’t think you could fly this way! It is a must for any adult who seeks to enrich and deepen communications with the young ones in their life.

Why do we tell stories? What power lies within storytelling? From the great myths and legends to enchanting fairy tales, parables, fables, and folk tales, stories can have a great healing and educative power. They come from our subconscious and imagination, deep inside us. They have much to teach us about ourselves and the world we create around us.

Described as a manual for ‘soul ecology’, in his book Kornberger first explores this ‘story power’, then explains how to apply it to help a child develop, or to heal and transform a child with difficulties. He then discusses the art and practicalities of creating new stories to help children with particular needs.

This is a valuable and inspiring book for teachers, parents, creative writers, and students of literature.

This is another favourite book of mine because it rigorously shows communities' environmental inequalities. Agyeman identifies the critical problems of local communities regarding environmental inequalities by reviewing a series of small cases and one larger case in the US.

I like Agyeman’s reviews of these cases because they allow readers to draw valuable lessons and inspire ideas for re-interpreting environmental injustices in different localities. I also like the methodology of the book, which can be used in different localities as an approach to measuring environmental justice.

By defining performance, outcome, and accountability indicators, Agyeman helps us to measure progress toward sustainability.

This book contains twelve easily told tales that can be used to discuss character development. The Norfolks include suggestions for classroom use of the tales. I like to recommend this to the teachers in my storytelling classes as the advice comes from a teacher who has written several other books on using stories in the classroom.

I love how the wonderful illustration of the tree with three children on the book's cover evoked my imagination to read this story. This feeling was reinforced when I opened the book and read the quotation on the first page: “So much world all at once” by Wislawa Syzmborska.

It is, indeed, a fascinating story that immersed me in a rich plot and introduced me to a diversity of characters who gained life in the little town of Blackbird Tree.

In this story, I could see the mastery of creating a tapestry, with the written words as the threads that bring together different worlds, feelings, and emotions, like love, friendship, and forgiveness.

Elements of this book feel made for me – a woman, alone on her sheep farm on a remote British island, faces predatory danger that straddles the line between real and imagined, internal and external. The writing is pure poetry, each detail telegraphing threat.

A stark natural world surrounds and encroaches on the home that strong, complex, reclusive Jake shares with her dog named Dog (as soon as this good boy was introduced, the stakes ratcheted). I can’t shake this frightening and moving exploration of misogyny, patriarchal terror, and trauma.

When I read this book, it was the full Jade Phoenix trilogy put into one paperback, so for me it was a really long book that showed someone completely fail in life, then drag himself back up and crawl his way to the top. It also exposed me to the ‘Clans’ and what they meant. 

Position by merit. Earning your place through combat. A desire to prove yourself and gain power, but not by sucking up or backstabbing. Imagine a nation led by warriors instead of politicians. Even though the Clans aren’t the ‘good guys,’ there’s a huge difference between this book and all others. Enough that it stuck with me and the concept was reused in my own book as an homage to these Battletech books.

Matthew is a serial public speaking champion who basically should be entered in The Moth Hall of Fame asap. If you've never heard Matthew Dicks talk, pause this and go watch his videos online. He's that good. What I love about his book is that he shares how he crafts his own stories and shares some amazing tips on how to capture everyday events that can later on be turned into powerful stories. Although this book isn't so much geared towards business or work, I think everyone can learn a great deal from Matthew's impressive experience of making people pay attention and connect to what you say (both as a best-selling novelist, school teacher, and public speaking champion).