As Minnesota wakes up from winter, March’s Book of the Month from Ramsey County Library explores the relationships between people and the places they live in and the threats climate change poses to both of them.

by Casper Hill — Media Relations Manager, Ramsey County Library

In “The Last House Before the Sea: One Year on the Ebro Delta,” author Gabi Martínez retreats to a fragile outpost at the edge of Spain, spending a year in a solitary cabin on the ever-shifting island of Buda. As the land and water continually redraw the map, he immerses himself in the rhythms of rice farmers, eel fishermen, migratory birds and gathering storms.

While Martínez grows close to the people who remain, and to the island itself, he begins to see how tightly their lives are intertwined with the landscape. What unfolds becomes less of a distant environmental study and more of a personal reckoning.

This book wonderfully blends nature writing, travel narrative and intimate memoir while asking readers to consider impermanence and what it means to love a place that may not survive us.

Description from Restless Books:

The magnificent account of a year lived on Buda, a rural island in northern Spain, “The Last House Before the Sea” contemplates sprawling coastal marshes, flocks of nesting seabirds and a relentless Atlantic horizon. Author and journalist Gabi Martínez stitches scenes of the natural world alongside the day-to-day lives of the island’s residents, many of whose families have called Buda home for generations.

But something is beginning to imperil the age-old rhythms of local industry and the Ebro River’s flow to the coast. The delta, that fragile mouth that connects land and sea, is shifting. As climate change tilts the scale of a fragile coexistence and rising waves threaten to swallow fields and farmhouses, the locals must reconcile their past with their future— both beholden to a landscape that grows more endangered with each passing day.

Find copies of ‘The Last House Before the Sea: One Year on the Ebro Delta’ at the Ramsey County Library or on Libby.