Winner, A Friend of Darwin Award, 2024 A gorgeously composed narrative nonfiction book about the longstanding relationship between prehistoric plants and life on Earth. Immaculately framed by ancient stone, the leaves look as if they were pressed between the gray pages of a great geological diary. If we were to see the plant alive, we would simply pass it by, but the fossil is a whisper from a time more than 55 million years ago, when alligators dwelled within the Arctic Circle and gigantic dragonflies buzzed through the air. This little plant is an entry-point into this lost world. Past, present, and future, this ancient specimen has roots in all of them. We often retell the history of life on Earth as a series of great moments in which fascinating animal life springs forth, all the while forgetting the plants that made these moments possible. But we can’t understand our own history without them. Or, our future. Dinosaurs, saber-toothed cats, and all mammals would be nothing without the efforts of their leafy counterparts. Even humans would likely not exist had plants not taken root to sow the land for our amphibious ancestors. Using the same scientifically-informed narrative technique that readers loved in the award-winning The Last Days of the Dinosaurs, in When the Earth Was Green, Riley Black brings readers back in time to prehistoric seas, swamps, forests, and savannas where critical moments in plant evolution unfolded. Each chapter stars plants and animals alike, underscoring how the interactions between species have helped shape the world we call home. As the chapters move upwards in time, Black guides readers along the burgeoning trunk of the Tree of Life, stopping to appreciate branches of an evolutionary story that links the world we know with one we can only just perceive now through the silent stone, from ancient roots to the present.

Thirty-five-year-old Arabella, a New York theatre director whose dating and career prospects are drying up, is offered an opportunity to direct a risqué cross-dressing interpretation of a Shakespeare classic (that might garner international attention) in the West Bank. Her grandmother, Zoya, plots to make a match between her and Aziz, a Palestinian American doctor volunteering in Gaza. Arabella agrees to meet Aziz since her growing feelings for Yoav, a celebrated Israeli American theatre designer, seem destined for disaster. Arabella and Aziz’s instant connection reminds Zoya of the passion she once felt for Aziz’s grandfather, a man she desired desperately, even after her father arranged another husband for her. In turn, Zoya would later marry off her youngest daughter, Naya, who aspired to date the Jackson 5 and wasn’t ready to be a wife or mother to Arabella at sixteen. Now that Naya’s children are grown and she’s arrived at an abrupt midlife crossroads, it’s time to settle old scores…