Book description
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.
From her outpost in an isolated mountain cabin, Deanna Wolfe, a
reclusive wildlife biologist, watches a den of coyotes that have
recently migrated into the region. She is caught off guard by a
young hunter who invades her most private spaces and confounds her
self-assured, solitary life. On a farm several miles down the
mountain, 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 that has become
her own. And a few more miles down the road, a pair of elderly
feuding neighbours tend their respective farms and wrangle about
God, pesticides, and the possibilities of a future neither of them expected.
Over the course of one humid summer, these characters find their
connections to one another and to the flora and fauna with whom they
share a place. Prodigal Summer demonstrates a balance of
narrative, drama and ideas that is characteristic of Barbara
Kingsolver's finest work.
Barbara Kingsolver was born in 1955 and grew up in eastern Kentucky.
She left there and went on to obtain degrees in biology from Depauw
University and, later, the University of Arizona. In the intervening
years she lived in Greece, northern France, Great Britain and the USA,
supporting herself variously as an archaeologist, typesetter, X-ray
technician, copy editor for a small-town newspaper, and biological
researcher, before becoming a full-time writer. Her books include
poetry, non-fiction and award-winning fiction, and in 1999 she was
shortlisted for the Orange Prize for The Poisonwood Bible. She lives
with her husband and daughter in southern Arizona and in the mountains
of southern Appalachia.
