Summer Challenge 2026: Nature Plays a Role

Looking for help completing your Summer Challenge Bingo Card? Here are some books where nature plays a major role in the story!

Updated June 25, 2026
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Where the Water Meets the Sky
Les Becquets, Diane
For fans of Tell Me Everything and Heartwood, Where the Water Meets the Sky is the story of a brave young woman seeking wholeness and love in the untamed forests of Michigan's upper peninsula--and answers about a fire that took away everything. On a...
The Wilder Way: A Memoir of Adventure, Freedom, and an Uncharted Life
Zu Beck, Eva
Paper Book
From the internationally beloved YouTube adventurer and National Geographic TV host, a singular and fearless new travel memoir packed with inspiration for leading a more vibrant, wild, and authentic life. Are you living with a capital "L"? When was the last time you truly felt...
Seven steeples
Baume, Sara
Paper Book
One of Wall Street Journal's 10 Best Books of the Year * Shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize * Shortlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize * An Irish Times Best Book of the Year "One of the most beautiful novels I have ever read." --New York Times Book Review The acclaimed...
The river has roots
El-Mohtar, Amal
Paper Book
A Locus and Nebula Award Winner for Best Novella! A Hugo Award finalist! An Indie Next and LibraryReads Pick! The River Has Roots is the hugely anticipated solo debut of the New York Times bestselling and Hugo Award winning author Amal El-Mohtar....
Braiding sweetgrass for young adults : indigenous wisdom, scientific knowledge, and the teachings of plants
Kimmerer, Robin Wall
Paper Book
I could hand you a braid of sweetgrass as thick and shining as the braid that hung down my grandmother's back. But it is not mine to give, nor yours to take. Wiingaashk belongs to herself. I offer, in her place, a braid of stories meant to heal our relationship with the world. As a...
Night in the world : a novel
English, Sharon
Paper Book
A 49th Shelf 2022 Book of the Year A tender ensemble novel about coming home to oneself and one's family through the beauty and soulfulness of Earth, even in an age of unravelling. Brothers Justin and Oliver have never been close. Justin owns an iconic Toronto...
Land-water-sky = Ndè-ti-yat'a
Lafferty, Catherine
Paper Book
A vexatious shapeshifter walks among humans. Shadowy beasts skulk at the edges of the woods. A ghostly apparition haunts a lonely stretch of highway. Spirits and legends rise and join together to protect the north. Land-Water-Sky/Ndè-Tı-Yat'a is the debut novel from Dene author Kat...
Eradication: A Fable
Miles, Jonathan
Paper Book
A blackly comic literary gem in which a broken man confronts a broken world on an uninhabited Pacific island, where a conservation assignment becomes a moral reckoning. "An instant classic." --The Washington Post * "Excellent " --The New York Times * "Urgent and lyrical...
Infinite Paradise: Witnessing the Wild, a Memoir
Ebertt Beeaff, Dianne
Paper Book
With personal vignettes and colour photographs that track the seasons of a single year, Infinite Paradise connects readers with the wildlife on sixteen acres of forest and water meadow along the Conestoga River in Southern Ontario, Canada. Broken into seasons and then further into months and days,...
Daughters of snow and cinders
Tamarit, Nuria
Paper Book
Fleeing the fires of her war-torn homeland, a young woman travels to the New World in search of gold to rebuild her life. In this strange, lawless land, Joana encounters friends (the kind Native women Tala and Opa), foes (the cruel gold hunter Matwei and his men), and an unexpected traveling...
All the pretty places : a novel of the Gilded Age
Callaway, Joy
Paper Book
"A timeless and powerful novel of a daring woman who must decide if she will risk everything to follow her passion and find her voice." --Patti Callahan Henry, New York Times bestselling author From the moment she was born, the transforming beauty of her family's nurseries has arrested her...
Belonging with Indigenous Lands : Resurgence, Reciprocity, and Environmental Stewardship in the Tla-o-qui-aht Tribal Parks
Reid-Hresko, John.
Explores an innovative environmental movement and economic justice initiative in one of Canada's first Indigenous-managed park systems, along with its reception by settler communities in Tofino. In the places we call home, how do we belong? Belonging with Indigenous Lands...
Only a Little While Here
Ospina, Maria
Paper Book
Winner of the Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Prize * Winner of Colombia's National Novel Award This prizewinning novel interweaves four animal odysseys in a gripping, adventurous meditation on migration and displacement in the inextricable human and natural worlds. ...

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