Old songs can bring new life. A beleaguered dryad in search of safe harbor in a land ravaged by an invasive fungus finds herself at odds with a young dryad who wields the blasphemous magic of men. The two of them must find a way to work together before a vicious sorcerer hunts them down and puts an end to them both.

WINNER OF THE 2018 JOHN BURROUGHS MEDAL FOR OUTSTANDING NATURAL HISTORY WRITING “Both a love song to trees, an exploration of their biology, and a wonderfully philosophical analysis of their role they play in human history and in modern culture.” —Science Friday The author of Sounds Wild and Broken and the Pulitzer Prize finalist The Forest Unseen visits with nature’s most magnificent networkers — trees David Haskell has won acclaim for eloquent writing and deep engagement with the natural world. Now, he brings his powers of observation to the biological networks that surround all species, including humans. Haskell repeatedly visits a dozen trees, exploring connections with people, microbes, fungi, and other plants and animals. He takes us to trees in cities (from Manhattan to Jerusalem), forests (Amazonian, North American, and boreal) and areas on the front lines of environmental change (eroding coastlines, burned mountainsides, and war zones.) In each place he shows how human history, ecology, and well-being are intimately intertwined with the lives of trees. Scientific, lyrical, and contemplative, Haskell reveals the biological connections that underpin all life. In a world beset by barriers, he reminds us that life’s substance and beauty emerge from relationship and interdependence.

When Kuku first heard of the great hunters and warriors and their voyage into the forest beyond the mountains and never returned, his childish wish was to find out the truth behind the story. The perceptions about the flora and fauna were negative. The forest was believed to harbor wild animals. The dead forest. The devils vineyard. The inhabitants were against him, but Kuku was bent on finding out more about their ancestors of blessed memory. Follow him through the story full of suspense as he uncovers the mysteries in the dead forest.

Cal Oakenflame is a mage on a mission. Sent to the town of Harrison to deal with threats to its livestock, Cal meets the sassy and self-controlled Petra, and discovers that the thefts of the livestock are more than they seem. When Cal rescues Petra, kidnapped by sheep-stealing bandits, they uncover a plot to take over the town, led by a mysterious Preacher.

Carter and Kat think they know every tree, river, and rock within five miles of their homes, but this section of wood, completely devoid of life, was not supposed to exist. Stepping through a doorway into a bizarre world filled with darkness, terror, and death, they embark on a quest to discover the greatest treasure of all.

A girl makes a secret sacrifice to the faerie king in this lush New York Times bestselling fantasy by author Holly Black. Set in the same world as The Cruel Prince! In the woods is a glass coffin. It rests on the ground, and in it sleeps a boy with horns on his head and ears as pointed as knives.... Hazel and her brother, Ben, live in Fairfold, where humans and the Folk exist side by side. Since they were children, Hazel and Ben have been telling each other stories about the boy in the glass coffin, that he is a prince and they are valiant knights, pretending their prince would be different from the other faeries, the ones who made cruel bargains, lurked in the shadows of trees, and doomed tourists. But as Hazel grows up, she puts aside those stories. Hazel knows the horned boy will never wake. Until one day, he does.... As the world turns upside down, Hazel has to become the knight she once pretended to be. The Darkest Part of the Forest is bestselling author Holly Black's triumphant return to the opulent, enchanting faerie tales that launched her YA career.

A community's rituals and practices surrounding death are one of its foremost ways of making sense of itself and its relationship to the passage of time. Historical time, in particular, with its attendant social and political shifts, is most directly experienced and reckoned with through those whom time leaves behind, the men and women whose lives come to form that community's past. In Songs for Dead Parents, distinguished anthropologist Erik Mueggler investigates death in a mountain community in Yunnan Province, which he studied over a period spanning two decades. Through evocative analyses of the community's rituals, exchanges, laments, and chants, Mueggler shows how their way of thinking and feeling the passage of time and the loss of life is rooted in the landscape surrounding them and the raw materials it provides. These materials give new substance to the dead, as they transform from body to effigy to stone to text in a cycle of degeneration and regeneration that gives shape to the ongoing life of the community. In the wake of the disappearance of the socialist rituals that once gave people narrative structures with which to understand historical change, death rituals have become ways of coming to terms with that socialist past as well as ways of moving forward from it and creating new forms of meaning. What emerges from Mueggler's book is a powerful analysis of a praxis and poetics of grief, one whose personal and historical dimensions are profoundly intertwined. Written in an accessible language for multiple audiences, Songs for Dead Parents will appeal to anthropologists, historians, scholars of modern China, and any reader interested in how a community grieves, mourns, and endures.