barbara kingsolver book about butterflies

In 2000, Kingsolver established the Bellwether Prize to support 'literature of social change.' She has been nominated for the PEN/Faulkner Award and the Pulitzer Prize. Kingsolver has received numerous awards, including the UK's Orange Prize for Fiction 2010, for The Lacuna and the National Humanities Medal. Each of her books published since 1993 have been on The New York Times Best Seller list. Her work often focuses on topics such as social justice, biodiversity, and the interaction between humans and their communities and environments. Her most famous works include The Poisonwood Bible, the tale of a missionary family in the Congo, and Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, a non-fiction account of her family's attempts to eat locally. Kingsolver earned degrees in Biology at DePauw University and the University of Arizona and worked as a freelance writer before she began writing novels. She was raised in rural Kentucky and lived briefly in Africa in her early childhood. As the community lines up to judge the woman and her miracle, Dellarobia confronts her family, her church, her town, and a larger world, in a flight toward truth that could undo all she has ever believed.īarbara Kingsolver is an American novelist, essayist, and poet. The bewildering emergency draws rural farmers into unexpected acquaintance with urbane journalists, opportunists, sightseers, and a striking biologist with his own stake in the outcome.

She can only understand it as a cautionary miracle, but it sparks a raft of other explanations from scientists, religious leaders, and the media. As she hikes up a mountain road behind her house to a secret tryst, she encounters a shocking sight: a silent, forested valley filled with what looks like a lake of fire. Now, after a decade of domestic disharmony on a failing farm, she has settled for permanent disappointment but seeks momentary escape through an obsessive flirtation with a younger man. Characters and reader alike are quickly carried beyond familiar territory here, into the unsettled ground of science, faith, and everyday truces between reason and conviction.ĭellarobia Turnbow is a restless farm wife who gave up her own plans when she accidentally became pregnant at seventeen. In the lyrical language of her native Appalachia, Barbara Kingsolver bares the rich, tarnished humanity of her novel's inhabitants and unearths the modern complexities of rural existence.

With a deft and versatile empathy Kingsolver dissects the motives that drive denial and belief in a precarious world.įlight Behavior transfixes from its opening scene, when a young woman's narrow experience of life is thrown wide with the force of a raging fire. Flight Behavior takes on one of the most contentious subjects of our time: climate change.

Barbara kingsolver book about butterflies