Suspiciously Specific- Grief-fiction: Finding healing from Grief in Nature...

My Suspiciously Specific Recommendations for February will themed around a topic that’s close to my heart this time of year: grief. Not only does February mark some significant dates and anniversaries in relation to my personal grief, but it also feels like the perfect time of year for the subject matter: gloomy, cold and dark, but with days that are ever so slowly lengthening again towards summer. In this mini-series, I’ll share some grief-themed books, clustered by suspiciously-specific subgenre.

This week: books that feature one of my personal favourite tropes of all time: healing from grief through nature.

Non-fiction

• The Salt Path - Raynor Winn

  Genre: memoir

  A non-fiction memoir documenting a couples track along the 630 miles of the sea-swept South West Coast Path, as they work throught their grief of losing their livelihood and the husbands recent diagnosis with a neurodegenerative disease.

• The Way Through the Woods - Long Litt Woon

  Genre: memoir A grieving widow feeling disconnected from life discovers a most unexpected obsession -hunting for mushrooms -in a story of healing and purpose.

• In Waves - A.J. Dungo

  Genre: graphic memoir A loveletter in graphic-novel form, from an illustrator to his late partner and the shared love of surfing that endured throughout their time together.

• Something in the Woods Loves You - Jarod K. Anderson

  Genre: memoir with elements of poetry A meditation on love, mortality and renewal. With the authors background of writing poetry, it's not a surprise that this reads somewhere in the grey area between poetry and non-fiction.

• Some of Us Just Fall - Polly Atkin

  Genre: memoir, disability

  A memoir of chronic illness, nature and grieving the loss of health. Polly Atkin weaves her personal experiences with Ehlers Danlos Syndrome and Hemochromatosis, into scenes of lake-swimming and adaptive forest-ecosystems. One of my favourite memoirs and a top-10 read of 2024.

Fiction

Forests and Swamps:

• Hemlock - Melissa Faliveno

  Genre: literary fiction, horror

  Representation: loss of a parent, missing parent, alcoholism/substance abuse.

  A queer, gothic novel about a woman returning to her family’s deteriorating cabin deep in the Wisconsin Northwoods, where her mother disappeared years before and never returned.

• Green Fuse Burning - Tiffany Morris

  Genre: eco-horror novella Representation: loss of a parent an artist suffering from painters-block after the passing of her father is gifted a solo cabin-retreat in the woods to spark her creativity again. Isolated in the swampy woods, she is forced into a hallucinatory confrontation with her grief.

• Once There were Wolves - Charlotte McConaghy

  Genre: literary fiction Representation: loss of a parent, substance abuse, complex PTSD Inti Flynn arrives in Scotland with her twin sister, Aggie, to lead a team of biologists tasked with reintroducing fourteen gray wolves into the remote Highlands. She hopes to heal not only the dying landscape, but Aggie, too, unmade by the terrible secrets that drove the sisters out of Alaska.

• Prodigal Summer – Barbara Kingsolver

  Genre: literary fiction Three parallel stories intertwine - a reclusive wildlife biologist, a city-girl turned farmer's wife and a group of quarreling neighbours fighting over matters of God and pesticides - intertwine in rural Appalachia. Over the course of one humid summer, these characters find their connections to one another and to the flora and fauna with whom they share a place.

• Wildwood Whispers – Willa Reece

  Genre: magical realism Representation: loss of a friend, fostercare. a young woman travels to a sleepy southern town in the Appalachian Mountains to bury her best friend and “foster-system-sister”, and finds healing through the towns gentle magic and connection to nature.

• Where The Forest Meets the Stars – Glendy Vanderah

  Genre: contemporary fiction Representation: loss of a parent, cancer, mental health (depression). A PhD student in ornitology retreats in solitude to small-town rural Illinois for her research, in the depths of grief over the loss of her mother and her own recent confrontation with cancer. Through the local people, new setting and an unexpected encounter in the woods, she finds new hope and connections.

The Ocean:

• Our Wives Under the Sea – Julia Armfield

  Genre: literary horror Representation: loss of partner, loss of self, trauma.

  The relationship between two women is never the same after one of them returns forever changed by the trauma of a deep-sea mission that ended in catastrophe.

• Migrations – Charlotte McConaghy

  Genre: literary fiction Representation: trauma, recovering from abusive relationship, loss of self. A woman willing to go to the end of the earth to outrun her traumatic past, boards a ship on a journey to the arctic ocean, following the last migration of the few remaining arctic sterns on the brink of extinction.

• Wild Dark Shore – Charlotte McConaghy

  Genre: literary fiction

  Representation: loss of parent, loss of partner, recovering from abusive relationship After the tragic death of their wife/mother, a father and his three children live an isolated existance on the remote Antarctic island of Shearwater, tending to the worlds largest seedbank located there. Their isolated lives are shaken up by the arrival of a woman who - surviving against all odds - washes ashore on their doorstep.

• The Gracekeepers  - Kirsty Logan Genre: adult fantasy

  In a world largely flooded by ocean, two storylines intertwine: North; a circus-performer bringing hope and entertainment to the islanders with her bear, and Callanish; a gracekeeper administering shoreside burials, laying the dead to their final resting place deep in the depths of the ocean.

• August Isle – Ali Standish Genre: middle-grade contemporary

  A 12-year old girl spends her summer on the Floridian island where her mother used to holiday when she was a child. Here, she confronts her fear of water ánd a grief that's hung over her family for years.

• The Thing About Jellyfish – Ali Benjamin Genre: middle-grade contemporary After her best friend dies in a drowning accident, Suzy is convinced that the true cause of the tragedy must have been a rare jellyfish sting. Retreating into a silent world of imagination, she crafts a plan to prove her theory--even if it means traveling the globe, alone.

• The Last True Poets of the Sea – Julia Drake

  Genre: young adult contemporary Representation: mental health (depression), attempted suicide (brother of protagonists, off-page).

  A teen girl spends the summer in the wake of her brothers suicide-attempt in the town where her ancestors were rumoured to have shipwrecked decades before. Whilst attempting to recover from what happened to her own family in the past year, she investigates the oceanic legacy her ancestors left in the coastal town of Lyric.

Desert and Sands

• Death Valley - Melissa Broder Genre: literary fiction, magical realism Representation: loss of parent, chronic illness/disability, caregiving. A woman takes a hallucinatory hike across a seemingly impossible desert, in an attempt to escape a cloud of sorrow—for both her father in the ICU and a husband whose illness is worsening.

• The Desert Sky Before Us - Anne Valente Genre: literary fiction Representation: loss of parent

  Two estranged sisters—one, a former racecar driver and the other a recently-released prisoner—who embark on a road trip together to complete the scavenger hunt their mother designed for them before her death.

• Where the Sky Lives - Margaret Dilloway Genre: middle-grade contemporary Representation: loss of uncle When life doesn’t make sense, twelve-year-old amateur astronomer Tuesday Beals has always looked to the stars above Zion National Park, where she lives. Her beloved late uncle Ezra taught her astronomy, but now their special stargazing sites are all she has left of him, along with his ashes and a poem that may be a riddle.

• Sun Birth - An Yu Genre: magical realism

  Representation: death of parent/disappearance of parent A magical realism tale following two sisters in an isolated village as the sun begins to diminish above them in a quiet and drawn out apocalypse.

• Swim Home to the Vanished - Brendan Shay Basham Genre: magical realism Representation: loss of sibling, substance abuse, discrimination against Native Americans A deeply layered parable, exploring a man’s grief over the loss of his brother, and his search for redemption, through the lens of Diné creation mythology.

• Snake Eater - T. Kingfisher Genre: fantasy, horror Representation: recovering from an abusive relationship

  A woman, desperate for a new start after coming out of the tail-end of an abusive relationship, moves to a remote desert town in the US-desert - only to find herself beholden to the wrath of a vengeful god...

Gardening and Flowers:

• Wild Beauty – Anna Marie McLemore Genre: young adult magical realism Representation: queer relationships, loneliness, loss of family-members For nearly a century, the Nomeolvides women have tended the grounds of La Pradera, the lush estate gardens that enchant guests from around the world. They’ve also hidden a tragic legacy of loneliness: if they fall in love too deeply, their lovers vanish. But then, after generations of vanishings, a strange boy appears in the gardens.

• Death and the Gardener - Georgi Gospodidov

  Genre: literary fiction with elements of memoir Representation: death of parent, caregiving An intimate portrait of a garden-loving father and son in the final days leading up to (and following) the formers passing. Through memories and conversations, it explores the different seasons of life, as imagined through gardeners glasses.

• The Girl from Earths Ends - Tara Dairman

  Genre: middle-grade fantasy Representation: terminal illness of parent, disability, non-binary identity (friend of protagonist)

  Gifted 12-year old gardener Henna embarks on a journey far from her island home to search for the plant that might save her papa’s life in this story of love, grief, and growth.

• Things that Grow - Meredith Goldstein

  Genre: Young Adult contemporary Representation: loss of grandparent After her grandmother dies, a girl travels to different gardens to scatter her ashes, learning about life, love, and how to laugh again along the way.

• Garden Spells -  Sarah Addison Allen

  Genre: adult fantasy A family of garden-witches has lived isolated for generations, in their garden-estate, tending to a prophetic tree, bearing extraordinary fruit. When a prodigal daughter, who fled the isolated gardens years before, returns, it opens up old wounds in the family.