Books by Barbara Kingsolver

Barbara Kingsolver's acclaimed international bestseller tells the story of an American missionary family in the Congo during a poignant chapter in African history. It spins the tale of the fierce evangelical Baptist, Nathan Price, who takes his wife and four daughters on a missionary journey into the heart of darkness of the Belgian Congo in 1959. They carry with them to Africa all they believe they will need from home, but soon find that all of it - from garden seeds to the King James Bible - is calamitously transformed on African soil. Told from the perspective of the five women, this is a compelling exploration of African history, religion, family, and the many paths to redemption. The Poisonwood Bible was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in 1999 and was chosen as the best reading group novel ever at the Penguin/Orange Awards. It continues to be read and adored by millions worldwide.

Mother and adopted daughter, Taylor and Turtle Greer, are back in this spellbinding sequel about family, heartbreak and love. Six-year-old Turtle Greer witnesses a freak accident at the Hoover Dam during a tour of the Grand Canyon with her guardian, Taylor. Her insistence on what she has seen, and her mother's belief in her, lead to a man's dramatic rescue. The mother and adopted daughter duo soon become nationwide heroes - even landing themselves a guest appearance on the Oprah Winfrey show. But Turtle's moment of celebrity draws her into a conflict of historic proportions stemming right back to her Cherokee roots. The crisis quickly envelops not only Turtle and her guardian, but everyone else who touches their lives in a complex web connecting their future with their past. Embark on a unforgettable road trip from rural Kentucky and the urban Southwest to Heaven, Oklahoma, and the Cherokee Nation, testing the boundaries of family and the many separate truths about the ties that bind.

"e;We wanted to live in a place that could feed us: where rain falls, crops grow, and drinking water bubbles up right out of the ground."e;Barbara Kingsolver opens her home to us, as she and her family attempt a year of eating only local food, much of it from their own garden. Inspired by the flavours and culinary arts of a local food culture, they explore many a farmers market and diversified organic farms at home and across the country. With characteristic warmth, Kingsolver shows us how to put food back at the centre of the political and family agenda. Animal, Vegetable, Miracle is part memoir, part journalistic investigation, and is full of original recipes that celebrate healthy eating, sustainability and the pleasures of good food.

She was one of the fugitive bands of Cherokee who'd resisted capture long ago. Decades later, her family takes Great Mam on a road trip home, to a place now named Cherokee.

"e;The flames now appeared to lift from individual treetops in showers of orange sparks, exploding the way a pine log does in a campfire when it is poked. The sparks spiralled upward in swirls like funnel clouds. Twisters of brightness against grey sky."e;On the Appalachian Mountains above her home, a young mother discovers a beautiful and terrible marvel of nature: the monarch butterflies have not migrated south for the winter this year. Is this a miraculous message from God, or a spectacular sign of climate change. Entomology expert, Ovid Byron, certainly believes it is the latter. He ropes in Dellarobia to help him decode the mystery of the monarch butterflies.Flight Behaviour has featured on the NY Times bestseller list and is Barbara Kingsolver's most accessible novel yet.

From Pulitzer Prize nominee and award winning author of Homeland, The Poisonwood Bible and Flight Behaviour, The Lacuna is the heartbreaking story of a man torn between the warm heart of Mexico and the cold embrace of 1950s America in the shadow of Senator McCarthy. Born in America and raised in Mexico, Harrison Shepherd is a liability to his social-climbing flapper mother, Salome. When he starts work in the household of Mexican artists Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo - where the Bolshevik leader, Lev Trotsky, is also being harboured as a political exile - he inadvertently casts his lot with art, communism and revolution. A compulsive diarist, he records and relates his colourful experiences of life with Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo and Trotsky in the midst of the Mexican revolution. A violent upheaval sends him back to America; but political winds continue to throw him between north and south, in a plot that turns many times on the unspeakable breach - the lacuna - between truth and public presumption.

With the eyes of a scientist and the vision of a poet, Barbara Kingsolver explores her trademark themes of family, community and the natural world. Defiant, funny and courageously honest, High Tide in Tucson is an engaging and immensely readable collection from one of the most original voices in contemporary literature.'Possessed of an extravagantly gifted narrative voice, Kingsolver blends a fierce and abiding moral vision with benevolent and concise humour. Her medicine is meant for the head, the heart, and the soul.' New York Times Book Review

The short stories in this collection are spread over landscapes ranging from northern California and the urban Southwest to the hills of eastern Kentucky and the Caribbean island of St Lucia. In every setting the characters are bound by a strong sense of place and the 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'. Homeland and Other Stories follows in the tradition of some of the great short story writers of our time, including Alice Munro, Flannery O'Connor and Annie Proulx. With disarming honesty - at times comic but often heartrending - Barbara Kingsolver emerges as a true master of the form.

In this collection of essays, the author of High Tide in Tucson brings to us (out of one of history's darker moments) an extended love song to the world we still have. From its opening parable gleaned from recent news about a lost child saved in an astonishing way, the book moves on to consider a world of surprising and hopeful prospects ranging from an inventive conservation scheme in a remote jungle to the backyard flock of chickens tended by the author's small daughter.Whether she is contemplating the Grand Canyon, her vegetable garden, motherhood, adolescence, genetic engineering, TV-watching, the history of civil rights, or the future of a nation founded on the best of all human impulses, these essays are grounded in the author's belief that our largest problems have grown from the earth's remotest corners as well as our own backyards, and that answers may lie in those places, too. In the voice Kingsolver's readers have come to rely on - sometimes grave, occasionally hilarious, and ultimately persuasive - Small Wonder is a hopeful examination of the people we seem to be, and what we might yet make of ourselves.

A wonderful novel about unravelling a young woman's secret past.

An enchanting and classic novel of a young woman's voyage of discovery across the Midwest.