Winner of the Orange Prize for Fiction in 2010 and on the shortlist for the Women's Prize for Fiction 2013.
A topical, engrossing and thought-provoking read exploring how the unexpected arrival of millions of Monarch butterflies, due to climate change, in a poor rural area of America has profound effects on a whole community and in particular a discontented woman trapped in a loveless marriage dreaming of escape. Kingsolver, winner of the Orange Prize for Fiction in 2010 with The Lacuna and currently on the shortlist for the same prize with The Poisonwood Bible in 2013 has a real talent for getting you right inside her characters' lives and this is no exception in the poetically written and well researched Flight Behaviour.
On the Appalachian Mountains above her home, a young mother discovers a beautiful and terrible marvel of nature.
As the world around her is suddenly transformed by a seeming miracle, can the old certainties they have lived by for centuries remain unchallenged? Flight Behaviour is a captivating, topical and deeply human story touching on class, poverty and climate change. It is Barbara Kingsolver's most accessible novel yet, and explores the truths we live by, and the complexities that lie behind them.
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.
