Ever since The Poisonwood Bible, I have been in love with Barbara Kingsolver's works. Maybe it was my life as a farmer, maybe my work with nature, animals and the environment that makes me a magnet to her writing. It's her view of 'wonders' that always eats at my mind-vision. Even now, after all the other literature between us, I can still feel her description of the army of ants crawling through a village.
I think I keep bees because of her, Diane Ackerman and Saint Francis.
I'd like to hear her lecture, but it would have to be outside in a field or in a forest.
New novel Flight Behavior to be released in November 2012
Dellarobia Turnbow is a restless young mother on the verge of settling for permanent disappointment, having given up other plans when she became pregnant and married in high school. Now twenty-nine, she lives with flattening deprivation and domestic disharmony on a failing sheep farm in eastern Tennessee. Seeking short-term escape through an obsessive flirtation with a younger man, she hikes up a back road to meet him in the novel's opening scene, and instead encounters something she can't understand: a forested valley filled with silent red fire that strikes her as a miracle. It proves to be something far more complex, sparking diverging explanations from scientists, religious leaders, politicians, and the media. For Dellarobia the event drives irrevocable changes as she is forced to confront and lock horns with her family, her church, her community, her continent, and finally, her world.
Kingsolver’s fourteenth book, Flight Behavior (HarperCollins) deepens her exploration of timely themes: the novel's subject is climate change, along with the media exploitation and political opportunism that lie at the root of what may be our most urgent modern dilemma. In a suspenseful plot that brings together rural farmers and urbane scientists in a bewildering emergency, the novel dissects the motives that drive denial and belief in a precariously shifting world.
Library Journal review of Flight Behavior
Dellarobia Turnbow is in a perpetual state of fight or flight. Married at 17 to kind, dull Cub, she finds even the satisfaction of motherhood small consolation for the stultifying existence on her in-laws’ struggling Tennessee sheep farm. When a fluke of nature upends the monotony of her life, Dellarobia morphs into the church’s poster child for a miracle, an Internet phenomenon, and a woman on the verge of unexpected opportunity as scientists, reporters, and ecotourists converge on the Turnbow property. Orange Prize winner Kingsolver (The Lacuna) performs literary magic, generously illuminating both sides of the culture wars, from the global-warming debate to public education in America. It’s a joy to watch Dellarobia and her precocious son, Preston, blossom under the tutelage of entomologist Ovid Byron. VERDICT . Highly recommended. —Sally Bissell, Lee Cty. Lib. Syst., Ft. Myers, FL
The Latest Word
Kingsolver, Flight Behavior featured in Time Magazine
October 25, 2012. For more information, click here.
"A New Kind of Day"An excerpt from Barbara's upcoming novel Flight Behavior (HarperCollins, November) has been published in Orion Magazine's September / October, 2012, issue.
