A book about wonder, loss, transformation — and the wild generosity of the living world.

Preorder here, or request a copy from your favorite local bookstore!

As a wilderness guide ranging from Alaska’s Inside Passage to the Sea of Cortez, Hannah Hindley has spent a life paying close attention to what lives beneath the surface. Now, in her debut essay collection, she invites us to do the same — to find, in the lives of fish, a guide through our own depths.

In this luminous debut collection, Hindley explores small creatures, big landscapes, and the shimmering connections between aquatic life and the human experience. Across eighteen lyrical essays, Love and Other Fish weaves together meticulously researched natural history with deeply personal stories. Drawing on years of work on boats and coastlines, Hindley uses encounters with fish—from remote desert canyons to Alaska’s glacier country—as guides for navigating the depths of heartbreak, hope, and transformation. Rendered with a tenderness for both the wild planet and the human heart, Love and Other Fish will leave readers with a renewed sense of wonder at the world around them.

Preorder here, or request a copy from your favorite local bookstore!

Acclaim for Love and Other Fish

“In describing Love and Other Fish, I could use words like wonder, heartbreak, astonishment, clarity, rumination, and understanding. But what I really want to say is just read this book. With its beautiful narratives and contemplations, Love and Other Fish explores the strangeness of human experience and the strangeness of looking back. How wonderful and immersive to be guided by such a wise and generous writer.” ~Beth Nguyen, author of Owner of a Lonely Heart: A Memoir

“Hannah Hindley is one of those rare writers whose generosity, knowledge, and lyricism take you on adventures of the heart and wilds while also making you feel right at home. Love and Other Fish swims among watery lives, including ours, with assurance, vulnerability, and wisdom. These essays are gorgeous.” ~Christopher Cokinos, author of Still as Bright: An Illuminating History of the Moon from Antiquity to Tomorrow

“These astonishing essays braid grief, science, and love so tenderly that the world itself feels newly textured—each fish, each memory, each bright moment asking us to pay better attention to what keeps us alive. Love and Other Fish moves with a deep tenderness—an attention to the overlooked and the nearly forgotten—and in doing so, builds a world where memory, love, and survival can swim and splash beside each other.” ~Aimee Nezhukumatathil, author of World of Wonders: In Praise of Fireflies, Whale Sharks, and Other Astonishments

“Science and the mysteries, the measurables, and the ineffables, the learned, and the felt are pulled together and arranged in this gorgeous collection, a musculature built of personal bravery and a sense of oneness with the natural world. A lyrical sensibility married to the precisions of scientific exploration—a profound combination of ways of being, thinking/feeling, and forging kinship with the wider world. I’m thrilled this book will be in the world, especially at a time when we need to be stunned back into love and care and other worlds.” ~Lia Purpura, author of All the Fierce Tethers: Essays

“Love and Other Fish moves fluidly between taxonomy and personal vignette, stitching together a beautifully crafted piece collection that asks us who we are, who we’ve been, and how we are, ultimately, always plural animal selves. It’s a work that teaches and reaches for relation, asking readers to consider the pitfalls and possibilities of our gendered bodies.” ~Julietta Singh, author of The Breaks: An Essay