Arsenault reflects on her serene hometown and the cloaked environmental corruption plaguing it. The author, a National Books Critics Circle board member and book review editor at Orion, grew up in Mexico, Maine, a small town fortified by the Androscoggin River. She writes poignantly of growing up in a large nuclear family surrounded by the town’s dense forestlands. Her father and grandfather worked at the local paper mill, an entity that economically grounded the town and employed a large percentage of its residents, many of whom remained blind to the ever changing world around them.

The former U.S. poet laureate shares a personal memoir about the brutal murder of her mother at the hands of her former stepfather, and how this profound experience of loss shaped her as an adult and an artist.

Franny Stone cannot be contained. In a bleak near-future, she is a wanderer and a sleepwalker, a swimmer and a bird lover. Born in Australia, raised in Ireland by her mother while knowing nothing of her father, she ends up back in Australia with her paternal grandmother. Returning as an adult to Ireland, she works as a cleaner at a university, where Niall Lynch, a famous professor of ornithology, willingly succumbs to her dangerous bewitchment. Their shared ardor for the wild turns tragic as the sixth extinction accelerates.

Struggling to adjust to small-town life after having a baby, an accomplished New York City journalist immerses herself in social media before bonding with a babysitter from a very different walk of life.

When Massachusetts is overrun by a rabies-like virus that is incurable an hour after infection, a soft-spoken pediatrician navigates apocalyptic obstacles to get a vaccine to her eight-months pregnant friend.