Here are 100 books that The Water Knife fans have personally recommended if you like
The Water Knife.
Shepherd is a community of 12,000+ authors and super readers sharing their favorite books with the world.
In my early 50s, I thru-hiked the Ice Age Trail, one of just 11 National Scenic Trails in the U.S. The experience was so rewarding—in many different ways—that I vowed to hike the other 10. To date, I’ve thru-hiked six of the 11 and am in the midst of section-hiking two more. My enthusiasm for long-distance hiking and its numerous benefits also inspired me to transform my freelance writing business to one centered around hiking, whether that’s penning fitness articles for CNN, giving talks on long-distance trails, or writing articles I hope will inspire others to lace up their hiking shoes.
This book has been stuck in my heart for more than 40 years. While I don’t remember much of its details—I read it as part of a middle school book club—I can still feel this book.
When I was a kid, our family was never able to travel. Abbey’s book instilled in me the deep desire to one day explore our national parks and varied natural spaces, especially desert terrain. And ever since I reached adulthood, that’s exactly what I’ve been doing.
'My favourite book about the wilderness' Cheryl Strayed, author of Wild
In this shimmering masterpiece of American nature writing, Edward Abbey ventures alone into the canyonlands of Moab, Utah, to work as a seasonal ranger for the United States National Park Service.
Living out of a trailer, Abbey captures in rapt, poetic prose the landscape of the desert; a world of terracotta earth, empty skies, arching rock formations, cliffrose, juniper, pinyon pine and sand sage. His summers become spirit quests, taking him in search of wild horses and Ancient Puebloan petroglyphs, up mountains and across tribal lands, and down the…
It is April 1st, 2038. Day 60 of China's blockade of the rebel island of Taiwan.
The US government has agreed to provide Taiwan with a weapons system so advanced that it can disrupt the balance of power in the region. But what pilot would be crazy enough to run…
I’ve been a hiker for a long time, but it wasn’t until COVID-19 that I began to pay attention to the forests I was hiking through. I started with field guides to edible plants, then used Seek and iNaturalist apps to identify more species, and started taking macro photography of what I found. The more I paid attention to the minutiae of the natural world, the more I fell in love with every part of it. I’m worried our current priorities for climate change (preserving our way of life) are misguided. I’m worried about the future of all species. Every insect and every plant I’ve looked at close up is breathtakingly beautiful and worth saving.
As a fan of post-apocalyptic novels, I’ve always wondered what the world would actually look like without us. Weisman provides the answer in this book. He visits places that appear to have successfully moved on from humanity, such as the Białowiea forest, the Korean Demilitarized Zone, and the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, showing nature thriving without us.
It’s both comforting and sobering, suggesting, yet again, that humans aren’t necessary to the world and, in fact, maybe the world is better off without us. The most jaw-dropping revelation for me was when a paleobiologist calmly stated that humans will go extinct eventually. All species do. But life on Earth will keep going.
Revised Edition with New Afterword from the Author
Time #1 Nonfiction Book of the Year
Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award
Over 3 million copies sold in 35 Languages
"On the day after humans disappear, nature takes over and immediately begins cleaning house - or houses, that is. Cleans them right off the face of the earth. They all go."
What if mankind disappeared right now, forever... what would happen to the Earth in a week, a year, a millennium? Could the planet's climate ever recover from human activity? How would nature destroy our huge cities and our…
I am a former Shakespeare scholar who became increasingly concerned about the climate crisis after I had a son and started worrying about the world he would inherit after I died. I began to do research into climate communication, and I realized I could use my linguistic expertise to help craft messages for campaigners, policymakers, and enlightened corporations who want to drive climate action. As I learned more about the history of climate change communication, however, I realized that we couldn’t talk about the crisis effectively without knowing how to parry climate denial and fossil-fuel propaganda. So now I also research and write about climate disinformation, too.
This book shook me to my core. I felt so frightened by its vision of a world destroyed by global warming that I became even more determined to help get climate deniers out of power.
I know that other people who read this book were equally inspired to learn more about climate change or even join the climate movement. It’s really one of the most influential books of our time.
**SUNDAY TIMES AND THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER**
'An epoch-defining book' Matt Haig 'If you read just one work of non-fiction this year, it should probably be this' David Sexton, Evening Standard
Selected as a Book of the Year 2019 by the Sunday Times, Spectator and New Statesman A Waterstones Paperback of the Year and shortlisted for the Foyles Book of the Year 2019 Longlisted for the PEN / E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award
It is worse, much worse, than you think.
The slowness of climate change is a fairy tale, perhaps as pernicious as the one that says…
A Duke with rigid opinions, a Lady whose beliefs conflict with his, a long disputed parcel of land, a conniving neighbour, a desperate collaboration, a failure of trust, a love found despite it all.
Alexander Cavendish, Duke of Ravensworth, returned from war to find that his father and brother had…
I'm an apocalyptic optimist—but I didn’t start that way. For over 25 years, I’ve studied climate action efforts and documented why governments and businesses are falling short. It’s become clear that the systemic changes we need will only come through civil society mobilizing for climate action. I’ve explored this in books, articles, and as a contributor to the most recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) assessment. I hope my writing inspires you to embrace your own apocalyptic optimism—not as despair, but as a hopeful, urgent call to action. It’s a powerful first step toward what I believe is still possible: Saving Ourselves.
I am simultaneously inspired and repulsed by this book because it presents a terrible and wonderful fictionalized case study in apocalyptic optimism. In the novel, Robinson weaves a story of hope embedded in despair.
Having studied efforts to solve the climate crisis for over 25 years while witnessing its growing effects, the novel is pitch-perfect on the tensions we must overcome to save ourselves.
“The best science-fiction nonfiction novel I’ve ever read.” —Jonathan Lethem
"If I could get policymakers, and citizens, everywhere to read just one book this year, it would be Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future." —Ezra Klein (Vox)
The Ministry for the Future is a masterpiece of the imagination, using fictional eyewitness accounts to tell the story of how climate change will affect us all. Its setting is not a desolate, postapocalyptic world, but a future that is almost upon us. Chosen by Barack Obama as one of his favorite…
I used to think of television as a third parent. As a child of immigrants, I learned a lot about being an American from the media. Soon, I realized there were limits to what I could learn because media and tech privilege profit over community. For 20 years, I have studied what happens when people decide to make media outside of corporations. I have interviewed hundreds of filmmakers, written hundreds of blogs and articles, curated festivals, juried awards, and ultimately founded my own platform, all resulting in four books. My greatest teachers have been artists, healers, and family—chosen and by blood—who have created spaces for honesty, vulnerability, and creative conflict.
Published in 1995, Parable starts in July 2024 amidst the election of an autocrat who, by the sequel Parable of the Talents, literally pledges to “make America great again.” I started my platform in 2015 in the same context.
This novel pulled me into its harrowing tale of how to survive civilizational collapse: the dismantling of systems, norms, and climate change that we are all currently going through.
The lesson is ultimately about embracing change, caring for and trusting each other in community, and coming up with our own ways of being together. So many of our ancestors have survived periods of collapse by the same principles. These ancestral lessons still guide me, and I believe are critical to surviving AI dystopia.
The extraordinary, prescient NEW YORK TIMES-bestselling novel.
'If there is one thing scarier than a dystopian novel about the future, it's one written in the past that has already begun to come true. This is what makes Parable of the Sower even more impressive than it was when first published' GLORIA STEINEM
'Unnervingly prescient and wise' YAA GYASI
--
We are coming apart. We're a rope, breaking, a single strand at a time.
America is a place of chaos, where violence rules and only the rich and powerful are safe. Lauren Olamina, a young woman with the extraordinary power to…
I have an idea. A conviction, let's call it, that humanity is not doomed. The Mad Max scenario where civilization collapses, thrusting us into an anarchic hellscape in which the living envy the dead, is totally unrealistic and not likely to happen. So let's imagine a post-apocalyptic scenario in which people come together to help each other, to save what knowledge they can, to build something new and useful. To learn the lessons from the destruction that came before. This is what I tried to imagine in my novel Bannerless, and this is why this topic interests me so much.
So, this is a novel about a world in which a global pandemic means that large gatherings are illegal and everyone has adapted to life at home in isolation. It was published in 2019, and I read it summer of 2020. I'm not sure I've ever read anything that was this spookily, horrifyingly prophetic. That said, it's also really punk and ultimately uplifting. One of the characters is the lead singer of the band who it turns out inadvertently gave the last public concert ever, and she's trying to revive live music with underground concerts. Another character is the virtual talent scout who joins her cause. The story is about how you peel yourself out of trauma and disaster to find community again. Be warned, at this historical moment this one's a bit of a kick in the teeth.
'In A Song for a New Day, liberty and creative endeavour are compromised by political and socioeconomic reality. Pinsker presents a frighteningly real near-future US [and] movingly charts Rosemary's coming-of-age story as her world and Luce's collide' Guardian
BEFORE Luce is on the road. Success is finally within grasp: her songs are getting airtime; the venues she's playing are getting larger. But mass shootings, bombings and now a strange contagion are closing America down around her...
AFTER Rosemary is too young to remember the Before. She's grown up in a world where proximity to others is not only unusual, it…
The Duke's Christmas Redemption
by
Arietta Richmond,
A Duke who has rejected love, a Lady who dreams of a love match, an arranged marriage, a house full of secrets, a most unneighborly neighbor, a plot to destroy reputations, an unexpected love that redeems it all.
Lady Charlotte Wyndham, given in an arranged marriage to a man she…
I have an idea. A conviction, let's call it, that humanity is not doomed. The Mad Max scenario where civilization collapses, thrusting us into an anarchic hellscape in which the living envy the dead, is totally unrealistic and not likely to happen. So let's imagine a post-apocalyptic scenario in which people come together to help each other, to save what knowledge they can, to build something new and useful. To learn the lessons from the destruction that came before. This is what I tried to imagine in my novel Bannerless, and this is why this topic interests me so much.
When you study the long arc of history you begin to suspect that apocalypses aren't just inevitable, they're common. And so is survival, which is a really heartening thought. Human beings are crazily adaptable, and our ability to come together in communities (ideally, when we're at our best, which granted isn't always and is hard to see sometimes) will aid our survival. Annalee Newitz tells us how this is has happened before, and how it can happen again.
A Los Angeles Times Book Prize Finalist in Science & Technology
In its 4.5 billion-year history, life on Earth has been almost erased at least half a dozen times: shattered by asteroid impacts, entombed in ice, smothered by methane, and torn apart by unfathomably powerful megavolcanoes. And we know that another global disaster is eventually headed our way. Can we survive it? How? In this brilliantly speculative work of popular science, Annalee Newitz, editor of io9.com, explains that although global disaster is all but inevitable, our chances of long-term species survival are better than ever. Scatter, Adapt, and Remember explores…
Why me / this list? Well, as a kid of parents whose cities were blitzed, I spent my early years in a tiny English village, eventually walking to school through the graveyard of a 12th-century church. We moved to Canada when I was eight, and a whole new history bloomed – Iroquois and coureur de bois were magnetic! As I evolved into a voracious reader, Lee, Orwell, and Vonnegut got me into the complexity of people. Now I’m compelled to read (and write) stories centered on how experiences shape us as individuals, and as societies.
P.S. Shortly after my departure, archeologists found Roman ruins under that tiny English village.
Future-facing at the time of its publication in 1957, On the Beach isn’t really war fiction in the literal sense, because the fictional war around which it is built is already over.
Set in 1963 Australia, it details the life-affirming but grim experiences of a cast of characters including the crew of a US Navy submarine who are all facing inevitable and impending death from the aftereffects of massive nuclear war that has extinguished all life in the northern hemisphere.
The LA Times described it as "timely and ironic... an indelibly sad ending that leaves you tearful and disturbed," and The Economist called it "still incredibly moving after nearly half a century.” I’d call it a compelling and thought-provoking cautionary tale, and a ride you only want to go on via your imagination.
Pearson English Readers bring language learning to life through the joy of reading.
Well-written stories entertain us, make us think, and keep our interest page after page. Pearson English Readers offer teenage and adult learners a huge range of titles, all featuring carefully graded language to make them accessible to learners of all abilities.
Through the imagination of some of the world's greatest authors, the English language comes to life in pages of our Readers. Students have the pleasure and satisfaction of reading these stories in English, and at the same time develop a broader vocabulary, greater comprehension and reading…
I’m a crime and horror author based in New York City. I’ve lived through a couple of direct hits from mega-storms and other natural disasters, including Hurricane Sandy, which plowed through my neighborhood in 2012. Those kinds of experiences leave a psychological mark I’ve tried to process through both fiction and non-fiction. This writing has also allowed me to explore how people and cities could potentially survive the calamities that await us, especially in coastal regions vulnerable to climate change.
There’s no storm in J.G. Ballard’s masterpiece of post-apocalyptic fiction, just the aftermath. This was another book that I read at a highly impressionable age and return to every so often, especially when I’m writing something disaster-related. It takes place in a London flooded by climate change: a science team is dispatched to the feverish swamp that was once a great city, where they’re confronted by pirates and other dangers.
It always blows my mind that Ballard wrote the book in 1962, well before the current debate over the climate. The thrilling set-pieces aside, it’s also a chilling reminder of how nature can still topple even the mightiest cities.
A debut novel, set in London in the near future. The capital city has been flooded and transformed into a tropical location where social aberrations only serve as an indicator of the level of corruption of the modern mentality.
This book follows the journey of a writer in search of wisdom as he narrates encounters with 12 distinguished American men over 80, including Paul Volcker, the former head of the Federal Reserve, and Denton Cooley, the world’s most famous heart surgeon.
In these and other intimate conversations, the book…
When I was eight years old, I read a book titled Dar Tellum: Stranger from a Distant Planet, by James R. Berry. It told the story of a boy who communicates with an alien intelligence to save the Earth from… global warming. That was in 1973, and it was the first time I’d heard about “the greenhouse effect”. Some things haven’t changed since then: I still read (and write) sci-fi, and I still have Dar Tellum on my bookshelf. But our climate is changing, and I’ve chosen four books of science fiction and one of science facts that help us think about the future—and present—of our planet.
In the wake of super-hurricanes and the deadly pandemic that follows, New Orleans has been quarantined from the rest of the United States, and those who seek to cross the border wall are killed. Narrator Fen, a member of the clan-based culture that has developed behind the wall, tells the story of her people and her personal quest for freedom in a dialect voice that is both beautifully rendered and brutally honest.
After a string of devastating hurricanes and a severe outbreak of Delta Fever, the Gulf Coast has been quarantined. Years later, residents of the Outer States are under the assumption that life in the Delta is all but extinct…but in reality, a new primitive society has been born.
Fen de la Guerre is living with the O-Positive blood tribe in the Delta when they are ambushed. Left with her tribe leader’s newborn, Fen is determined to get the baby to a better life over the wall before her blood…
