Kirjahaku

A richly glittering debut about the interlocked fates of two women, raised worlds apart, who must join forces on an extraordinary journey, diving leagues beneath the water's surface--and straight into the fathomless heart of fear, forgiveness, and love. Thirteen years ago, Otta escaped her small town, determined to become a marine biologist. Now she's returned, carrying the guilt of a friend's disappearance during a deep-sea dive and unsure she'll ever be able to dive again. Then a stranger appears at her door. This stranger, May, says that her daughter has run away, and insists that she's under the nearby lake--alive. To find the missing girl, Otta and May must travel deeper and deeper under the water, confronting webs of fear, control, and delusion borne of a rampant nostalgia for a purer world. Along the way, they will also push their bodies to the mortal limit. Hypnotic and arresting, Underlake brings a poet's attention to language, evoking the ethereal work of Marilynne Robinson, Lauren Groff, and Emily St. John Mandel and the imaginative brio of Margaret Atwood. In taking her place as a major new voice in American fiction, McCoy shrewdly explores the American obsession with inheritance, property, and race, asking how we stake our claim on the timeline of history--and who we erase in the process.

Wrecks is a collection of poems inspired by the great auk, a flightless seabird driven to extinction in the mid-1800s. The last two known members of the species were killed on Eldey Island, Iceland, in 1844. The auk was repeatedly described by those who killed the bird as making human-like gestures and sounds, including sighs. Wrecks investigates how the human-nonhuman binary and the dehumanization it enables makes space for violence--against animals and the environment, but also against other humans. It explores the colonial systems that drive extinction, and the hierarchical structure by which hegemonic powers decide what is--and what is not--human. It engages the author's experience of dehumanization as an atheist growing up in the conservative South; it also interrogates her complicity in systems of structural racism, and her inheritance as the descendant of colonizers.

Since before history began, the human species has been waging a war. Viruses have claimed countless lives and have swept through civilizations in deadly pandemics. Certain viruses, such as Ebola, hantavirus, and strains of influenza, still pose a threat today. Some scientists believe that a large outbreak of an extremely deadly infectious disease is likely to occur soon. A virus could either develop naturally or be created by terrorists or hostile states for use as a weapon. This book uses photographs, sidebars, and a glossary to explain the most pressing of these threats we face today, and what individuals and organizations are doing to prevent an outbreak.

Rising ocean temperatures, melting glaciers, and widespread climate change have caused food shortages, threatened human settlements, and endangered wildlife. Accelerated global warming caused by pollution and the excessive release of greenhouse gases may be the most pressing threat our planet faces today, and it is key that children understand the complexity of this issue from an early age. Readers will learn the science behind global warming with the aid of full-color photographs and charts, a glossary, and sidebars. They will also discover what individuals, nations, and organizations such as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the Nature Conservancy can do to save the planet.