We’re now a quarter of the way through the 21st century, and it’s indisputable that climate is one of the most important stories of our time. That’s our philosophy here at Heatmap, but just about everything around us illustrates it, too — from government policy and tech to movies and reality TV.
And of course — or maybe, especially — books.
It’s been about 17 years since the term “cli-fi” (or “climate fiction”) was first coined, and in the meantime, books that touch on climate themes in both fiction and nonfiction have taken off like the Keeling Curve. In 2025, we’ll be reading novels that imagine life in San Francisco after years of deluge and investigative reports into subjects such as how companies have gotten away with dumping forever chemicals into the environment for so long. There will be new natural histories to dive into — on the desert, forests, prairies, and even on the chemical compound CO2 — as well as new frames of thinking about climate change and how we approach its solutions.
Because so many 2025 books will touch on climate themes, I’ve set aside a section of honorable mentions at the end of this list that are also worth checking out. The division doesn’t indicate quality; I chose the primary 18 based on my subjective excitement and to showcase different genres, publishers, and authors. It might be in the appendix that you find a book on the topic you’re personally most excited about (Arctic exploration? Solar geoengineering? Florida-set family dramas?) for next year.
Finally, if you want to see all these books in one place or judge them by their (excellent) covers, you can browse our curated list on Bookshop here.
American Oasis: Finding the Future in the Cities of the Southwest, by Kyle Paoletta (January 14)
The U.S. government’s Fifth National Climate Assessment section on the Southwest reads like an apocalyptic horror story: “Heat-related mortality,” “increased wildfire risks,” and “longer and more severe droughts” all make it into the opening few paragraphs. The truth is that the hottest and driest region of the United States is home to 60 million people, many of whom will have to adapt to a more extreme future in the coming years. In New Mexico-born journalist Kyle Paoletta’s debut book, American Oasis, he traces the allure of places like Albuquerque, Phoenix, El Paso, and Las Vegas back to the Athapaskan migration from the sub-Arctic around 1100 BCE and through the heydays of Arizona Highways, a magazine from the 1950s, while also charting what lies ahead for those who are drawn to making the desert, however impossibly, their home. Preorder it here.
Elegy, Southwest, by Madeleine Watts (Feb. 18)
Speaking of the American desert, on the fiction side of things this winter comes Madeleine Watts’ latest novel, Elegy, Southwest. Watts made a name for herself as a writer of cli-fi after the release of her 2021 novel, The Inland Sea, set against the backdrop of Australia’s fires and floods, and she returns this year with a road trip novel that follows Eloise, a doctoral student studying the Colorado River and climate change. As part of her research, Eloise flies to Las Vegas for a road trip through the Southwest with her husband, Lewis, to whom the novel is addressed. Along the way, Eloise begins to believe she’s pregnant, while Lewis struggles with the fresh grief of losing his mother. As Watts told an interviewer of her process for The Inland Sea, “I wanted to write … about what it’s like to live in the experience of a changing climate that is not always a tangible part of your day-to-day but that’s already there – it’s in the air all around you.” Expect a similar treatment this go-round. Preorder it here.
Dream State, by Eric Puchner (Feb. 18)
Eric Puchner’s new novel, Dream State, is the story of two marriages set over 50 years. With the book opening in 2004, that naturally requires some speculation about the future — in this case, the future of “a rapidly warming Montana.” As The Indypendent writes in an early review, “The looming climate crisis — declining snowfall, depleted wildlife, raging seasonal wildfires, and abnormally warm temperatures — is writ large in the book, forming a blistering backdrop, highlighting newfound restrictions on what both residents and short-term visitors can now see and do in the area.” The novel has earned praise from Pulitzer Prize-winner Adam Johnson, who called it “a masterpiece,” as well as author Lynn Steger Strong, who has a climate book of her own on the list below. Preorder it here.
The Unworthy, by Agustina Bazterrica, translated by Sarah Moses (March 4)
Four years ago, Argentinean author Agustina Bazterrica burst onto Americans’ radars with the English-language translation of her 2017 novel Tender Is the Flesh, a book that imagines a future in which animals have become toxic to humans, leading us to resort to industrialized cannibalism. (Critics have described it, vividly, as “splatterpunk.”) This year, Bazterrica turns her attention from factory farming to the climate catastrophe, telling the story of a member of a “Sacred Sisterhood” cloistered in a mysterious convent who is prompted to reflect on her life outside its walls when a new acolyte arrives. Don’t expect Bazterrica to soften her critiques of capitalism here, though it’s not all doom and gloom; early readers have said The Unworthy “ends on a light note of hope.” Preorder it here.
Wild Dark Shore, by Charlotte McConaghy (March 4)
Charlotte McConaghy’s follow-up novel to her critically acclaimed 2020 debut, Migrations, is set on a fictional research island, Shearwater, located between Australia and Antarctica. Dominic Salt, the caretaker of the island’s seed vault, has called the refuge home for the past eight years — ever since fleeing Australia’s accelerating natural disasters, hoping to find a safer place to raise his three children. But with rising sea levels now threatening the island, Dominic and his family have just seven weeks left before they plan to move on. Just before their departure, Dominic’s oldest daughter discovers a woman who has shipwrecked on shore, and the tension — and mystery — starts to grow. Wild Dark Shore has earned a starred review from Kirkus, which calls it a “terrific thriller.” Preorder it here.
Climate Injustice: Why We Need to Fight Global Inequality to Combat Climate Change, by Friederike Otto (March 25)
Climatologist, World Weather Attribution co-founder, and 2024 Trailblazing Women in Climate laureate Friederike Otto does not mince words about who is most impacted by extreme weather — and who needs to be involved in the solutions. “If we leave the issue of climate change to white men, it’ll continue to be treated as a physical problem with technological solutions,” she has said, adding, “The more diverse the people working on it, the closer we get to implementing these solutions and making progress on climate change.” Her new book, Climate Injustice, elaborates on her thesis further, using the stories of real people in the Global South to illustrate how exploitation, sexism, and colonialism have created a crisis with unequal impacts. Preorder it here.
How Can I Help?: Saving Nature with Your Yard, by Douglas W. Tallamy (April 1)
Everyone who works in the climate space is familiar with the question posed in the title of this book. Entomologist Douglas W. Tallamy is one of the leading proponents of the native gardens movement, and in How Can I Help?, he answers a query implied in his own earlier book, 2009’s Bringing Nature Home: that “unless we restore native plants to our suburban ecosystems, the future of biodiversity in the United States is dim.” How Can I Help? is structured to address some of the most common questions Tallamy encounters during his lectures about how individuals can become directors of their own miniature national parks at home. Despite the daunting challenge of biodiversity loss, Tallamy offers actionable ideas for helping the planet, with conservation beginning in your backyard. Preorder it here.
Poisoning the Well: How Forever Chemicals Contaminated America, by Sharon Udasin and Rachel Frazin (April 10)
If I had to make one prediction for 2025, it’d be that we will hear a lot more about per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances — that is, the “forever chemicals” commonly known as PFAS. The chemicals are found in everything from our dental floss to our clothes, but perhaps most disturbingly, they’re also found in our drinking water. In Poisoning the Well, The Hill staff writers Sharon Udasin and Rachel Frazin follow how PFAS got into our environment in the first place — a story of corporate greed and cover-ups that will be familiar to anyone aware of the fossil fuel playbook. Preorder it here.
What's Left: Three Paths Through the Planetary Crisis, by Malcolm Harris (April 15)
Journalist Malcolm Harris’ last book was an “encyclopedic,” 700-page history of the city of Palo Alto, which became a fixture of best-of-the-year lists after it came out last February. Hot on its heels is Harris’ follow-up, What’s Left (which slow readers will be relieved to hear is less of a time commitment, at 320 pages). Harris’ intention with his new work is to explore “our remaining options for saving the world,” all of which involve varying degrees of collective action but which escalate from “progressive” to “socialist” to “revolutionary.” It’s one that you can be sure will have people talking. Preorder it here.
Hope Dies Last: Visionary People Across the World, Fighting to Find Us a Future, by Alan Weisman (April 22)
Alan Weisman’s hugely successful 2007 book, The World Without Us, speculated about humanity’s legacy if we suddenly disappeared. (Slate named it in 2019 as one of the 50 best nonfiction books in the past quarter-century.) Now, Weisman turns his attention to helping us stick around. “I am working on a book with kind of a vast topic, which is what are humanity’s best and most realistic hopes for getting through this very difficult century that we have,” he told Bangladesh’s Business Standard in 2022, while visiting the country during the research stage of his new project, Hope Dies Last. Weisman’s book took him all over the world — including the Korean de-militarized zone, the Netherlands, and the Marshall Islands — as he looked to speak with people across disciplines and professions about how we can approach our future. Bill McKibben has described the result as “a nonfiction companion to Kim Stanley Robinson’s Ministry for the Future.” Preorder it here.
Truth Demands: A Memoir of Murder, Oil Wars, and the Rise of Climate Justice, by Abby Reyes (May 6)
In 1999, 24-year-old environmentalist Terence Unity Freitas traveled to Colombia to support the Indigenous U’wa people in resisting Occidental Petroleum, which was interested in drilling to extract some 1.5 billion barrels of oil from beneath the cloud forest. During what was supposed to be a weeklong visit, Freitas was kidnapped by the Armed Revolutionary Forces of Colombia (better known as FARC) along with two other Americans; their bodies were later found, bound and shot, just over the border in Venezuela. Twenty years later, Abby Reyes — the author of this memoir and Freitas’ partner at the time of his death — was recognized as a victim in Colombia’s truth and reconciliation process, resurfacing old griefs, reflections, and questions. “I bring the reader along in my demand for truth before the tribunal while awakening our collective awareness of what the truth demands of all of us in this era of ecological collapse and social transformation,” Reyes has said of her book. Preorder it here.
Awake in the Floating City, by Susanna Kwan (May 13)
In Susanna Kwan’s debut novel, Awake in the Floating City, San Francisco is almost entirely underwater. Years of Biblical rain mean most people have already evacuated, but Bo — who lost her mother to the waters — lingers long past when sensible people have fled. Then one day, she receives a note from her neighbor, Mia, a 130-year-old woman who doesn’t want to leave the city, either; together, the two become the last people left in San Francisco. “What post-apocalyptic vision dares be so gorgeous?” marvels the author Meng Jin in one of the book’s early blurbs. Preorder it here.
Take to the Trees: A Story of Hope, Science, and Self-Discovery in America’s Imperiled Forests, by Marguerite Holloway (May 13)
Identical twin sister arborists teach the Women’s Tree Climbing Workshop. While that sounds like the beginning of a fairy tale, it’s the delightfully real-life starting point of journalist Marguerite Holloway’s Take to the Trees. “I was there to be in trees and to better understand them,” she writes of her attendance at the climbing workshop. “Trees and forests are facing existential threats because of climate change, but it can be a struggle to grasp the extent of the danger.” While not all of us have the time, ability, or inclination to take to such “gut-lurching” heights to learn more, we can read Take to the Trees, which records Holloway’s experience overcoming her fears and learning to appreciate the threat to American forests. Preorder it here.
Sea of Grass: The Conquest, Ruin, and Redemption of Nature on the American Prairie, by Dave Hage and Josephine Marcotty (May 27)
Natural history is one of my favorite genres, and I’m especially excited for Sea of Grass by Minnesota Star Tribute journalists Dave Hage and Josephine Marcotty about one of the more neglected ecosystems of the genre: the American prairie. The grassland, which makes up a vast swath of the inner United States, is an incredible self-sustaining marvel — and nearly as biodiverse as a tropical rainforest. Yet many people today still either share European settlers’ disinterested view of the landscape or adopt a purely utilitarian one — which is why, after 200 years of plows, drainages, and nitrogen fertilizers, the effects have been “catastrophic.” Still, plenty of people who live on the prairie understand the importance of protecting such a special ecosystem, and Hage and Marcotty follow the effort to work alongside the land, not just against it. Sea of Grass earned a coveted blurb from McKibben, in which he calls the book “well worth the read.” Preorder it here.
Cloud Warriors: Deadly Storms, Climate Chaos—And the Pioneers Creating a Revolution in Weather Forecasting, by Thomas E. Weber (June 3)
We’ve been attempting to predict the weather for as long as humans have existed. Satellites, radars, and computers helped us make a significant leap forward from the days of farmer’s almanacs, but advances in artificial intelligence, drones, and the proliferation of home weather stations have created previously unimaginable opportunities for accuracy. (It’s a tech frontier we’ve covered quite a bit here at Heatmap, as well). In his book, Journalist Thomas E. Weber dives into the wild — and wildly important — world of forecasting, which will hit shelves just in time for hurricane season. Preorder it here.
Human Nature: Nine Ways to Feel about Our Changing Planet, by Kate Marvel (June 17)
Climate scientist and Shift Key guest Kate Marvel structured her highly anticipated first book around nine different emotional lenses for looking at climate change. That might seem like an odd angle for a scientist, since researchers are specifically taught not to bring emotion into their work. Still, she contends that just as there is no one way to feel about climate change, there is no one emotion we can tap to guide our response to it, either. From hope to pride to love, Marvel urges readers to get deep into their feels in Human Nature, which also touches on “Greek mythology,” “witches,” “geophysical fluid dynamics,” and “romantic comedies” — though according to Marvel, you won’t find “despair” in its pages. A 120,000-copy initial print run suggests the publisher, Ecco, believes this one will be a hit. Preorder it here.
We Are Eating the Earth: The Race to Fix Our Food System and Save Our Climate, by Michael Grunwald (July 1)
Addressing climate change will require us to address how we eat, which accounts for a third of our carbon emissions. How to ameliorate that is one of the most significant questions we’re currently staring down as a species — and the topic of journalist and Heatmap contributor Michael Grunwald’s next book. Though the answers he finds might not always fit into our comfortable narratives — Grunwald recently ruffled feathers with a related piece for The New York Times defending industrial agriculture’s high yields on small parcels of land as our “best hope” — We Are Eating the Earth seems certain to reshape how its readers think about food, policy, and our thrice-daily consumptions. I can’t wait to be challenged by it. Preorder it here.
The Story of CO2 Is the Story of Everything, by Peter Brannen (Aug. 26)
Science journalist Peter Brannen’s last book was about the five times life on our planet almost ended in mass extinctions. His follow-up, The Story of CO2 Is the Story of Everything, will zero in on the collection of molecules that have allowed life to exist in the first place. Of course, the great irony of carbon dioxide is that while it has made our planet habitable, fluctuations in its presence in the atmosphere are also responsible for things like almost killing our ancestors all off in an event known as the Great Dying — and now, of course, we have put our thumb on that scale. By looking backward, often by many millions of years, Brennen gives us a glimpse of our future. You’ll definitely want to preorder this book, if only because it will look great on the shelf next to Brennen’s other Eric Nyquist-designed cover. Preorder it here.
Other climate books coming out in 2025:
The Edge of Water, by Olufunke Grace Bankole (Feb. 4), a novel about a Nigerian immigrant to New Orleans whose destiny is shaped by a hurricane; Ends of the Earth Journeys to the Polar Regions in Search of Life, the Cosmos, and Our Future, by Neil Shubin (Feb. 4), about what we can learn about life and our future from our world’s most extreme landscapes; Dimming the Sun: The Urgent Case for Geoengineering, by Thomas Ramge (March 4), which makes the case for solar geoengineering to turn down the heat on a warming planet; Bad Nature, by Ariel Courage (April 1), an ecological disaster road-trip novel with a patricide plot; Shelter and Storm: At Home in the Driftless, by Tamara Dean (April 8), a memoir about living through the era of climate uncertainty; The Float Test, by Lynn Steger Strong (April 8), a family drama set against the backdrop of a sweltering Florida summer; Atomic Dreams: The New Nuclear Evangelists and the Fight for the Future of Energy, by Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow (April 8), about the political reversal over nuclear’s place in the energy transition; Phytopolis: The Living City, by Stefano Mancuso (April 22), about how we can adapt our cities, greenly, to the challenges of the future; Carbon: The Book of Life, by Paul Hawken (March 18), about the element both responsible for life and perhaps the biggest threat against it; A Year of Compassion: 52 Weeks of Living Zero-Waste, Plant-Based, and Cruelty-Free, by Colleen Patrick-Goudreau (March 25), about how to protect the planet with small acts of kindness from home; The Lost Trees of Willow Avenue: A Story of Climate and Hope on One American Street, by Mike Tidwell (March 25), a chronicle of record year for climate change as seen on a single Washington, D.C., block; Ocean: Earth’s Last Wilderness, by David Attenborough and Colin Butfield (May 6), the story of one of the planet’s most critical features, co-authored by one of its most beloved natural historians; Arctic Passages: Ice, Exploration, and the Battle for Power at the Top of the World, by Kieran Mulvaney (May 13), about what the age of Arctic exploration can reveal to us about the future of the pole; Hot Takes: Every Journalist’s Guide to Covering Climate Change, by Sadie Babits (June 2), a handbook for incorporating climate science into your reporting.
Looking dimmer. Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
