I felt my lungs inflate with the onrush of scenery – air, mountains, trees, people. I thought, “This is what it is to be happy.”

Sylvia Plath

There are two things that will make any nature loving, free-spirited reader happy, a perfect day spent outdoors and a great nature book.

Whether you prefer to wander wild places, or simply stick your local hiking trails and nature parks, getting out into nature is a great way to clear your head and boost your mood. It’s calming, peaceful, beautiful, and a perfect place to sit in the sun and pick up a book.

To inspire you to get outdoors, we’ve curated a list of our favorite nature inspired novels. Wander ancient forests, hike snowy mountains, or survive on deserted islands from the safety of your picnic blanket or comfortable hammock. These novels will transport you to new places where you can explore the great outdoors with the characters as nature shapes their stories.

So, be inspired, get outside, and explore these exciting nature novels.

Inspirational Nature Books

Black Woods, Blue Sky, by Eowyn Ivey

Birdie’s keeping it together; of course she is. So she’s a little hungover, sometimes, and she has to bring her daughter, Emaleen, to her job waiting tables at an Alaskan roadside lodge, but she’s getting by as a single mother in a tough town. Still, Birdie can remember happier times from her youth, when she was free in the wilds of nature.

Arthur Neilsen, a soft-spoken and scarred recluse who appears in town only at the change of seasons, brings Emaleen back to safety when she gets lost in the woods. Most people avoid him, but to Birdie, he represents everything she’s ever longed for. She finds herself falling for Arthur and the land he knows so well.

Against the warnings of those who care about them, Birdie and Emaleen move to his isolated cabin in the mountains, on the far side of the Wolverine River.

It’s just the three of them in the vast black woods, far from roads, telephones, electricity, and outside contact, but Birdie believes she has come prepared. At first, it’s idyllic and she can picture a happily ever after: Together they catch salmon, pick berries, and climb mountains so tall it’s as if they could touch the bright blue sky. But soon Birdie discovers that Arthur is something much more mysterious and dangerous than she could have ever imagined, and that like the Alaska wilderness, a fairy tale can be as dark as it is beautiful.

Black Woods, Blue Sky is a novel with life-and-death stakes, about the love between a mother and daughter, and the allure of a wild life–about what we gain and what it might cost us.

Damnation Spring, by Ash Davidson

A stunning novel about love, work, and marriage that asks how far one family and one community will go to protect their future.

Colleen and Rich Gundersen are raising their young son, Chub, on the rugged California coast. It’s 1977, and life in this Pacific Northwest logging town isn’t what it used to be. For generations, the community has lived and breathed timber; now that way of life is threatened.

Colleen is an amateur midwife. Rich is a tree-topper. It’s a dangerous job that requires him to scale trees hundreds of feet tall–a job that both his father and grandfather died doing. Colleen and Rich want a better life for their son–and they take steps to assure their future. Rich secretly spends their savings on a swath of ancient redwoods. But when Colleen, grieving the loss of a recent pregnancy and desperate to have a second child, challenges the logging company’s use of the herbicides she believes are responsible for the many miscarriages in the community, Colleen and Rich find themselves on opposite sides of a budding conflict. As tensions in the town rise, they threaten the very thing the Gundersens are trying to protect: their family.

Told in prose as clear as a spring-fed creek, Damnation Spring is an intimate, compassionate portrait of a family whose bonds are tested and a community clinging to a vanishing way of life. An extraordinary story of the transcendent, enduring power of love–between husband and wife, mother and child, and longtime neighbors. An essential novel for our times.

The Overstory, by Richard Powers

The Overstory, winner of the 2019 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction, is a sweeping, impassioned work of activism and resistance that is also a stunning evocation of–and paean to–the natural world. From the roots to the crown and back to the seeds, Richard Powers’s twelfth novel unfolds in concentric rings of interlocking fables that range from antebellum New York to the late twentieth-century Timber Wars of the Pacific Northwest and beyond. There is a world alongside ours–vast, slow, interconnected, resourceful, magnificently inventive, and almost invisible to us. This is the story of a handful of people who learn how to see that world and who are drawn up into its unfolding catastrophe.

A Psalm for the Wild-Built: A Monk and Robot Book, Becky Chambers

In A Psalm for the Wild-Built, bestselling Becky Chambers’s delightful new Monk and Robot series, gives us hope for the future.

It’s been centuries since the robots of Panga gained self-awareness and laid down their tools; centuries since they wandered, en masse, into the wilderness, never to be seen again; centuries since they faded into myth and urban legend.

One day, the life of a tea monk is upended by the arrival of a robot, there to honor the old promise of checking in. The robot cannot go back until finding the answer to the question “what do people need?” .

But the answer to that question depends on who you ask, and how.

They’re going to need to ask it a lot.

Go as a River, by Shelley Read

Inspired by true events surrounding the destruction of the town of Iola in the 1960s.

Seventeen-year-old Victoria Nash runs the household on her family’s peach farm in the small ranch town of Iola, Colorado. She is the sole surviving female in a family of troubled men. Wilson Moon is a young drifter with a mysterious past, displaced from his tribal land and determined to live as he chooses.

Victoria encounters Wil by chance on a street corner. A meeting that profoundly alters both of their young lives, igniting as much passion as danger. When tragedy strikes, Victoria leaves the only life she has ever known. Fleeing into the surrounding mountains, she struggles to survive in the wilderness with no clear notion of what her future will bring. As the seasons change, she also charts the changes in herself, finding in the beautiful but harsh landscape the meaning and strength to move forward and rebuild all that she has lost, even as the Gunnison River threatens to submerge her homeland–its ranches, farms, and the beloved peach orchard that has been in her family for generations.

A story of deeply held love in the face of hardship and loss, but also of finding courage, resilience, friendship, and, finally, home–where least expected. This stunning debut explores what it means to lead your life as if it were a river–gathering and flowing, finding a way forward even when a river is dammed.

The Island of Missing Trees, by Elif Shafak

Two teenagers, a Greek Cypriot and a Turkish Cypriot, meet at a taverna on the island they both call home. In the taverna, hidden beneath garlands of garlic, chili peppers and creeping honeysuckle, Kostas and Defne grow in their forbidden love for each other. A fig tree stretches through a cavity in the roof. This tree bears witness to their hushed, happy meetings and eventually, to their silent, surreptitious departures. The tree is there when war breaks out, when the capital is reduces to ashes and rubble. The teenagers vanish. Decades later, Kostas returns. He is a botanist looking for native species, but really, he’s searching for lost love.

Years later a Ficus carica grows in the back garden of a house in London where Ada Kazantzakis lives. This tree is her only connection to an island she has never visited— her only connection to her family’s troubled history and her complex identity as she seeks to untangle years of secrets to find her place in the world.

A moving, beautifully written, and delicately constructed story of love, division, transcendence, history, and eco-consciousness, The Island of Missing Trees is Elif Shafak’s best work yet.

Isola, by Allegra Goodman

Reese’s Book Club and from the bestselling author of Sam.

A young woman and her lover are marooned on an island in this “lushly painted” (People) historical epic of love, faith, and defiance. 

Heir to a fortune, Marguerite is destined for a life of prosperity and gentility. When she then she becomes an orphan, and her guardian–an enigmatic and volatile man–spends her inheritance and insists she accompany him on an expedition to New France. That journey takes a turn when Marguerite gets a brutal punishment. She becomes alone on an island.

She was once a child of privilege who dressed in gowns and laced pearls in her hair. Now Marguerite finds herself at the mercy of nature. As the weather turns, blanketing the island in ice, she discovers a faith she’d never before needed.

Inspired by the real life of a sixteenth-century heroine, Isola is the timeless story of a woman fighting for survival.

The Light Pirate, by Lily Brooks-Dalton

Florida is slipping away. Devastating weather patterns and rising sea levels  are wreaking gradual havoc on the state’s infrastructure. Kirby Lowe, an electrical line worker, his pregnant wife, and their two sons, prepare for the worst. When the boys go missing just before the hurricane hits, Kirby heads out into the high winds in search of his children. Left alone, Frida goes into premature labor and gives birth to an unusual child, Wanda, whom she names after the catastrophic storm that ushers her into a society closer to collapse than ever before.

As Florida continues to unravel, Wanda grows. Moving from childhood to adulthood, adapting not only to the changing landscape, but also to the people who stayed behind in a place abandoned by civilization, Wanda loses family, gains community, and ultimately, seeks adventure, love, and purpose in a place remade by nature.

Told in four parts–power, water, light, and time. This book mirrors the rhythms of the elements. It shows the sometimes quick, sometimes slow dissolution of the world as we know it. It is a meditation on the changes we would rather not see. The future we would rather not greet, and a call back to the beauty and violence of an untamable wilderness.

For more nature inspired novels and poetry, check out our favorite nature poetry books. Explore littleinfinite.com for more great reading recommendations.