The best novels for immersing yourself in nature

I’ve always been drawn to novels of place – novels that plunge you into a world you’ve
never been before. As a child the novels that made indelible impressions on me
included The Last of the Mohicans by James Fenimore Cooper, A Tale of Two Cities by
Charles Dickens, and Heidi, by Johanna Spryi. As an adult I’ve based my vacation
travel to locales I’ve come to know from books –Cornwall because of Virginia Woolf, the
Eastern Townships because of the Three Pines novels of Louise Penny, and South
Carolina to hunt for the beachy area that inspired Fair Bay by Eleanor Frances
Lattimore, the first book I fell in love with as a child.

In the past decade as I worked on a novel set in Montauk I’ve turned to novels by
master writers who know how to bring a specific world alive – books by Richard Russo
and John Casey and Alice McDermott and Elizabeth Strout and Edward J. Delaney.
More specifically, because my novel deals with environmental issues, and as climate
change has become ever more problematic, I’ve been thinking a lot about nature and
our relationship to it. I’ve been drawn to novels that delve deeper into our relationship
with nature itself.

For those considerations, and for the sheer pleasure of experiencing other worlds, here
is a roundup of some recent books I’ve enjoyed. They’ll take you from Alaska to
Antarctica, and from Ireland to the deep blue ocean.