Explore Books suggests titles focused on life, death, houseboats

Each week as part of SunLit — The Sun’s literature section — we feature staff recommendations from book stores across Colorado. This week, the staff from Explore Books in Aspen recommends books about the life of a river, 17 brushes with death and a London houseboat community.

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From the publisher: Robert Macfarlane brings his glittering style to a profound work of travel writing, reportage, and natural history. “Is a River Alive?” is a joyful, mind-expanding exploration of an ancient, urgent idea: that rivers are living beings who should be recognized as such in imagination and law.

Macfarlane takes readers on three unforgettable journeys teeming with extraordinary people, stories, and places — to the miraculous cloud-forests and mountain streams of Ecuador, to the wounded creeks and lagoons of India, and to the spectacular wild rivers of Canada, imperiled by mining, pollution, and dams. Braiding these journeys is the life story of the fragile chalk stream a mile from Macfarlane’s house, a stream who flows through his own years and days.

From Yana Kucher, staff: A few years after his multi award-winning book “Underland,” nature writer Robert Macfarlane is back at it, this time to explore the Rights of Nature movement and investigate the question of whether rivers should be afforded legal rights of their own. This is no dry exploration of legal arguments — Macfarlane instead takes us on a thrilling journey to visit three very different rivers on three different continents, exploring both their unique power and significance to the surrounding communities, and the imminent threats they face from mining, pollution, and dams.

He approaches the central question with both skepticism and an open mind, with a combination of vivid, often poetic writing, fascinating characters, and enough facts to be compelling without bogging down the storytelling. Wherever you fall on the legal question of what rights our rivers deserve, you’ll surely never look at a river the same way again. 

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From the publisher: In this astonishing memoir, the New York Times bestselling author of “The Marriage Portrait” and “Hamnet” shares the 17 near-death experiences that have punctuated and defined her life.

The childhood illness that left her bedridden for a year, which she was not expected to survive. A teenage yearning to escape that nearly ended in disaster. An encounter with a disturbed man on a remote path. And, most terrifying of all, an ongoing, daily struggle to protect her daughter from a condition that leaves her unimaginably vulnerable to life’s myriad dangers.

Here, O’Farrell stitches together these discrete encounters to tell the story of her entire life. In taut prose that vibrates with electricity and restrained emotion, she captures the perils running just beneath the surface, and illuminates the preciousness, beauty, and mysteries of life itself.

From Mo Kirk, staff: You’ll recognize her as the author of “Hamnet” but this is a memoir. Somehow, she has had 17 brushes with death, and not only has she lived to tell the tale but has told it with extraordinary depth and reassurance. It was excellent.

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From the publisher: Penelope Fitzgerald’s Booker Prize–winning novel of loneliness and connecting is set among the houseboat community of the Thames. This edition includes a new introduction from Alan Hollinghurst.

On the Battersea Reach, a mixed bag of the slightly disreputable, the temporarily lost, and the patently eccentric live on houseboats, rising and falling with the tides of the Thames.

There is good-natured Maurice, by occupation a male prostitute, by chance a receiver of stolen goods. And Richard, an ex-navy man whose boat, much like its owner, dominates the Reach. Then there is Nenna, an abandoned wife and mother of two young girls running wild on the muddy foreshore, whose domestic predicament, as it deepens, will draw this disparate community together.

From Clare Pearson, book buyer and events coordinator: This short novel hosts a delightful collection of eccentric characters whose lives and outlooks are shaped by the tidal forces of the great Thames, on which they all live in houseboats in various states of disrepair. Fitzgerald’s writing was both gentle and biting, with sharp turns of humor and insight. 

Type of Story: Review

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