“ prose is lush and spellbinding, her humor subtle, and her story compelling, intelligent, sexy, and cathartic.” They’ll also respond to the sympathy with which she reflects the difficult lives of people struggling on the hard edge of poverty while tied intimately to the natural world and engaged an elemental search for dignity and human connection.” “Readers will be seduced by effortless prose, her subtle use of Appalachian patois. “A warm, intricately constructed book shot through with an extraordinary amount of insight and information about the wonders of the visible world.”

“A blend of breathtaking artistry, encyclopedic knowledge of the natural world, attention to detail, and ardent commitment to the supremacy of nature.Barbara Kingsolver remains a voice readers have come to respect and love, a writer we will keep reading for as long as she continues to grace us with her bounty.” “Kingsolver is a gifted magician of words.” “ sexy, lyrical fifth novel renders our solitary yearnings with a finely trained eye and ear.” “As illuminating as it is absorbing.Resonates with the author’s overarching wisdom and passion.” “Prodigal Summer is full of.tenderness, humor, and earthy spirituality.Kingsolver’s dialogue is absolutely natural, often funny, and sometimes heartbreaking.” Kingsolver’s writing is generously well-grafted choice moments.radiate from nearly every page.” The writing is excellent, beautiful descriptions, rich characters set within an amazing amount of information.' It was stories within stories, so much information about bugs, coyotes, farming, ecology, biology, psychology, which, if I'd seen it described this way, I'm sure I'd never have chosen. Just downloaded it to have something new to read on vacation. 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.Read by the author. 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.

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. 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. 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 in southern Appalachia. 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

A prodigal summer