· Indie Awards ·

Ten Landscapes, Ten Small Presses

Ten books about ground, water, weather and the things living in them — and not one of them from a Big Five publisher. These come from houses that print in the low thousands: Charco in Edinburgh, Peirene and Little Toller in England, Tramp in Dublin, Milkweed in Minneapolis. Three are translated. Two were out of print until a small press went and rescued them. Nature writing is the genre where independent publishers are quietly doing the best work — and where the covers are the best in the business.

10 booksAugust 2026

01
Two Trees Make a Forest
Jessica J. Lee
Published in the US by Catapult, the independent that has quietly built one of the better nonfiction lists in America. Lee writes the terrain with a scientist's precision and then lets the family silence sit there unresolved — the two halves never quite reconcile, which is the point.
02
The Wind That Lays Waste
Selva Almada
Charco Press in Edinburgh exists to bring Latin American writing into English, and Almada was their first real discovery — translated by Chris Andrews. The landscape here isn't scenery: the scrub and the coming storm apply the pressure that cracks the people open.
03
River
Esther Kinsky
Fitzcarraldo Editions, whose blue-jacketed fiction you can identify across a room. Iain Galbraith's translation from the German keeps Kinsky's long, silted sentences intact. Hand this to anyone who thinks nature writing means going somewhere unspoiled.
04
The Easternmost House
Juliet Blaxland
Sandstone Press works out of the Scottish Highlands; this was shortlisted for the Wainwright Prize and then went largely unread. An architect by training, Blaxland is unsentimental about losing the house, which makes the book far sadder than sentiment would have.
05
Stones of Aran: Pilgrimage
Tim Robinson
NYRB Classics brought this back for American readers with an introduction by Robert Macfarlane. Robinson is after what he calls the 'good step' — walking as a form of attention. One of the strangest and most complete books ever written about a single small place.
06
Four Hedges
Clare Leighton
Little Toller in Dorset rescues books like this — their Nature Classics Library is the only reason a 1935 gardening chronicle is in print at all. Leighton was among the century's finest wood engravers, and the pictures are the argument here, not the decoration.
07
Snow, Dog, Foot
Claudio Morandini
Peirene publishes only short books you can finish in one sitting. J Ockenden won the press's translation prize with this and then completed it on a writing retreat in the Pyrenees — a first full-length translation from the Italian. Very funny, until quite suddenly it isn't.
08
The Mushroom at the End of the World
Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing
A Princeton University Press anthropology monograph that reads like reportage — the rare academic book that got out of the academy. Best read in late summer, which is when the pickers go out.
09
Rising
Elizabeth Rush
Milkweed Editions is a Minneapolis nonprofit with the best environmental list in America. What sets this apart from other climate books is structural: Rush keeps stepping aside so residents can narrate, and it never becomes a reporter explaining a place to you.
10
handiwork
Sara Baume
Tramp Press in Dublin publishes very little and almost all of it is good. Baume is both a novelist and a trained sculptor, and this is the rare artist's book about process that is neither precious about the work nor evasive about grief and money.