New Books In Literature

We have a collective memory of a primeval world embodied in myth. It is a world where spirits lived in the trees, water, and mountains, and nature was sacred. Was such a world ever possible, or was it doomed as soon as humans spread? What went wrong with our planet and whose fault is it? Are innovators, who look to science for answers, agents of positive change, or merely heedless apologists for human greed? These are some of the many questions that Bell’s new novel, Appleseed (Custom House, 2021) provokes. No doubt a few literature students will be inspired to write papers. Bell’s ambitious and original triptych of interlocking stories explores man’s relationship with the wilderness through three timelines, set in the past, the near future, and the far future, after a cataclysmic catastrophe. Snow Piercer has nothing on this chilly future world, bereft of any life. Such a novel is a challenge to reduce to a synopsis. In one time period, the late 1800s, a faun, Chapman, suppresses his identity out of love for