Niger

A decade ago, I planted 12 acres of trees in a field that had proved unsuitable for productive grazing. The trees themselves are doing well but the most remarkable change has been the increase in birds, invertebrates and flora. Each year brings new species, new levels of abundance. It has been very satisfying and strangely quick. We’re encouraged to think that the planet’s natural processes work if not always at a geological pace, at least not in the instant reward timeframe that characterises our own brief lives. In Nature’s Echo, the leading ecologist Thomas Crowther takes this capacity for nature’s rapid recovery as one reason why we should temper pessimism about environmental catastrophe.

‘We should be living in a brave country and on a brave planet that bravely distributes its occupants,’ thinks Rose Goyenetche, a middle-class, middle-aged Parisian child psychologist and the heroine of Marie Darrieussecq’s Crossed Lines. As their hands touch, Rose feels a familiar electric ping, and their futures become linked The story unfolds on a Mediterranean cruise ship, where Rose is holidaying in a deluxe cabin (‘that is, economy class’) on an all-inclusive-without-alcohol-without-wifi package sponsored by her mother as a chance for Rose to get some perspective on her life.