A collection of 12 stories, with settings ranging from northern California to the hills of eastern Kentucky and the Caribbean island of St Lucia, that explore the twin themes of family ties and the life choices one must ultimately make alone.
Over landscapes ranging from northern California and the urban Southwest to the hills of eastern Kentucky and the Caribbean island of St Lucia, Barbara Kingsolver tells stories of hope, momentary joy and powerful endurance. In every setting her characters are bound by a strong sense of place and the compelling ties of love and family history: a child accepts the impossible responsibility of remembering her Cherokee great-grandmother's dying culture; a quietly dissolving couple must fight ghosts of past expectations to reach one another; a tough Mexican American woman finds herself in jail because of her commitment to a family legacy of 'doing the right thing.' With disarming honesty - at times comic but often heartrending - Barbara Kingsolver creates a world of love and possibility into which the reader is irresistibly drawn.
Barbara Kingsolver’s thirteen books of fiction, poetry and non-fiction include the novels The Bean Trees and the international bestseller The Poisonwood Bible which, amongst other accolades, won the 2005 Penguin/Orange Reading Group Book of the Year award. Her most recent novel is The Lacuna, which won the Orange Prize for Fiction.
Fellow novelist KERRY REICHS on BARBARA KINGSOLVER
After you read The Bean Trees, you’ll run to the bookstore to buyPigs in Heaven and Animal Dreams. I snap up Kingsolver’s novels from used bookstores so I have copies at the ready if I meet someone who has not yet had the pleasure. Observant and canny in character, Kingsolver’s women have heart and looking through their eyes opens mine. I read these books with a pen so I can easily return to favorite underlined phrases.
