Unlike many books with multiple narratives, these weren’t separate perspectives on the same central story. I didn’t know a lot about it, except that it had multiple narratives. Well, I ended up kicking myself for that, didn’t I?Īfter asking around, I decided to give Prodigal Summer (2000) a go – and I also decided (shelf space still an issue) to listen to the audiobook, read by Kingsolver herself. Mostly because they’re usually chunksters, and take up too much room on my limited shelves. I wouldn’t have read Pigs in Heaven if it weren’t for A Century of Books, and I was glad to find it still on my shelf – as I’d got rid of a few Kingsolver novels when I moved house. With the richness that characterizes Barbara Kingsolver's finest work, Prodigal Summer embraces pure thematic originality and demonstrates a balance of narrative and ideas that only an accomplished novelist could render so beautifully.Having surprised myself by how I loved Pigs in Heaven last year, I was keen to read more by Barbara Kingsolver. Their discoveries are embedded inside countless intimate lessons of biology, the realities of small farming, and the final, urgent truth that humans are only one part of life on earth. Over the course of one humid summer, as the urge to procreate overtakes a green and profligate countryside, these characters find connections to one another and to the flora and fauna with which they necessarily share a place. And a few more miles down the road, a pair of elderly, feuding neighbors tend their respective farms and wrangle about God, pesticides, and the complexities of a world neither of them expected. On a farm several miles down the mountain, another web of lives unfolds as Lusa Maluf Landowski, a bookish city girl turned farmer's wife, finds herself unexpectedly marooned in a strange place where she must declare or lose her attachment to the land. Deanna Wolfe, a reclusive wildlife biologist, watches the forest from her outpost in an isolated mountain cabin where she is caught off-guard by Eddie Bondo, a young hunter who comes to invade her most private spaces and confound her self-assured, solitary life.
At the heart of these intertwined narratives is a den of coyotes that have recently migrated into the region. Prodigal Summer weaves together three stories of human love within a larger tapestry of lives inhabiting the forested mountains and struggling small farms of southern Appalachia. Barbara Kingsolver, a writer praised for her"extravagantly gifted narrative voice" ( New York Times Book Review), has created with this novel a hymn to wildness that celebrates the prodigal spirit of human nature, and of nature itself.
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