Prodigal Summer

Best-selling novelist Barbara Kingsolver has delighted readers with novels like The Bean Trees and Pigs in Heaven. In Prodigal Summer, she turns her magical talents to three intertwined stories of a single lush Appalachian summer. A reclusive biologist watches with excitement as coyotes move onto the isolated mountain she patrols, unaware of the personal changes in store for her when she lets another stranger into her own most private spaces. On a farm down the mountain, a bookish city girl finds herself suddenly widowed, her life full of ghosts from the past and her future clouded in uncertainty. Down the road from the widow's farm, two elderly neighbors feud over everything from pesticides to God, gradually becoming aware of bonds that connect the two of them beneath their arguments. In a pattern as delicate as a moth's wings, Kingsolver weaves these three stories into a moving tapestry showing the fragile, unexpected ways that all of nature's aspects--including human lives--are intricately connected.