ISBN: 9780694524372

Barbara Kingsolver

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Triumphing once again, Barbara Kingsolver has written a beautiful new novel: a hymn to wildness that celebrates the prodigal spirit of human nature, and of nature itself

Prodigal Summer weaves together three stories of human love within a larger tapestry of lives in southern Appalachia. At the heart of these intertwined narratives is a den of coyotes that have recently migrated into the region. Deanna Wolfe, a reclusive wildlife biologist, watches them from 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 her solitary life. Down the mountain, another web of lives unfolds as Lusa Maluf Landowski, a bookish city girl turned farmer's wife, finds herself in a strange place where she must declare or lose her attachment to the land that has become her own. 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 possibilities the future holds.

Over the course of one long summer, these characters find connections to one another, and to the land, and the final, urgent truth that humans are only one piece of life on earth.

"[A] vibrant new novel....[A]n improbably appealing book with the feeling of a nice stay inside a terrarium."

Janet Maslin, New York Times, 11/02/2000

"Readers hoping for the emotional intensity and wide-angle vision of THE POISONWOOD BIBLE...will most likely be disappointed....Kingsolver is an ambitious writer, but here she has bitten off a lot that she doesn't really chew. A richer book might've given life to the hunter's worldview and Bible Belt ignorance rather than setting them up like bowling pins to be knocked down....PRODIGAL SUMMER has its plot twists, few of them surprising....In the end the expendable males have disappeared, and the women and children band together in their own blended families, like the coyotes....This may be an attractive fable, but it doesn't make for the kind of psychologically complex literature Kingsolver is well capable of."

Jennifer Schuessler, New York Times Book Review, 11/05/2000