Works by
Barbara Kingsolver
(Writer)
[1955 - ]

Collections

• Threebies (2003)
  Includes the Faber & Faber editions of Homeland, Pigs in Heaven, and Prodigal Summer.

• Barbara Kingsolver: Complete Fiction II (2002)
  This new boxed set brings together The Poisonwood Bible, Prodigal Summer, The Bean Trees, Homeland and Other Stories, Animal Dreams, and Pigs in Heaven.

• The Complete Fiction (1995)
  A boxed set containing three of Kingsolver's bestselling novels -- The Bean Trees, Animal Dreams, and Pigs in Heaven -- and her only collection of short stories, Homeland.

Novels

• Prodigal Summer: A Novel (2001)
  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. At the heart of these intertwined narratives is a den of coyotes that have recently migrated into the region. Deanna Wolfe, a reclusive wildlife biologist, watches the forest from her outpost in 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 confound her self-assured, solitary life. On a farm several miles down the mountain, another web of lives unfolds as 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. 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 complexities of a world neither of them expected.
  
  Over the course of one humid summer, as the urge to procreate overtakes a green and profligate countryside, these characters find connections to one another and to the flora and fauna with which they necessarily share a place. Their discoveries are embedded inside countless intimate lessons of biology, the realities of small farming, and the final, urgent truth that humans are only one part of life on earth.
  
  With the richness that characterizes Barbara Kingsolver's finest work, Prodigal Summer embraces pure thematic originality and demonstrates a balance of narrative and ideas that only an accomplished novelist could render so beautifully.

• The Bean Trees: A Novel (1998)
  Meet Taylor Greer. Clear-eyed and spirited, she grew up poor in rural Kentucky with two goals: to avoid pregnancy and to get away. She succeeds on both counts when she buys a '55 Volkswagen and heads west. But by the time she pulls up on the outskirts of Tucson, Arizona, at an auto repair shop called Jesus Is Lord Used Tires, she has reluctantly acquired a three-year-old companion named Turtle. What follows -- as Taylor meets the human condition head-on -- is at the heart of this memorable novel about love and friendship, abandonment and belonging, and the discovery of surprising resources in apparently empty places.

• The Poisonwood Bible: A Novel (1998) -- 2000 Oprah Book Club selection
  The Poisonwood Bible is a story told by the wife and four daughters of Nathan Price, a fierce, evangelical Baptist who takes his family and mission to the Belgian Congo in 1959. They carry with them everything they believe they will need from home, but soon find that all of it--from garden seeds to Scripture--is calamitously transformed on African soil. What follows is a suspenseful epic of one family's tragic undoing and remarkable reconstruction over the course of three decades in postcolonial Africa.
  
  The novel is set against one of the most dramatic political chronicles of the twentieth century: the Congo's fight for independence from Belgium, the murder of its first elected prime minister, the CIA coup to install his replacement, and the insidious progress of a world economic order that robs the fledgling African nation of its autonomy. Against this backdrop, Orleanna Price reconstructs the story of her evangelist husband's part in the Western assault on Africa, a tale indelibly darkened by her own losses and unanswerable questions about her own culpability. Also narrating the story, by turns, are her four daughters--the self-centered, teenaged Rachel; shrewd adolescent twins Leah and Adah; and Ruth May, a prescient five-year-old. These sharply observant girls, who arrive in the Congo with racial preconceptions forged in 1950s Georgia, will be marked in surprisingly different ways by their father's intractable mission, and by Africa itself. Ultimately each must strike her own separate path to salvation. Their passionately intertwined stories become a compelling exploration of moral risk and personal responsibility.
  
  Dancing between the dark comedy of human failings and the breathtaking possibilities of human hope, The Poisonwood Bible possesses all that has distinguished Barbara Kingsolver's previous work, and extends this beloved writer's vision to an entirely new level. Taking its place alongside the classic works of postcolonial literature, this ambitious novel establishes Kingsolver as one of the most thoughtful and daring of modern writers.

• Pigs in Heaven (1993)
  When six-year-old Turtle Greer witnesses a freak accident at the Hoover Dam, her insistence on what she has seen and her mother's belief in her lead to a man's dramatic rescue. But Turtle's moment of celebrity draws her into a conflict of historic proportions. The crisis quickly envelops not only Turtle and her mother, but everyone else who touches their lives in a complex web connecting their future and their past. A deeply felt novel of love despite the risks, of tearing apart and coming together, Pigs in Heaven travels the roads from rural Kentucky and the urban Southwest to Heaven, Oklahoma, and the Cherokee Nation. As this spellbinding novel unfolds, it draws the reader into a world of heartbreak and redeeming love, testing the boundaries of family, and the many separate truths about the ties that bind.

• Animal Dreams (1990)
  "Animals dream about the things they do in the day time just like people do. If you want sweet dreams, you've got to live a sweet life."
  
   So says Loyd Peregrina, a handsome Apache trainman and latter-day philosopher. But when Codi Noline returns to her hometown, Loyd's advice is painfully out of her reach. Dreamless and at the end of her rope, Codi comes back to Grace, Arizona to confront her past and face her ailing, distant father. What the finds is a town threatened by a silent environmental catastrophe, some startling clues to her own identity, and a man whose view of the world could change the course of her life. Blending flashbacks, dreams, and Native American legends, Animal Dreams is a suspenseful love story and a moving exploration of life's largest commitments. With this work, the acclaimed author of The Bean Trees and Homeland and Other Stories sustains her familiar voice while giving readers her most remarkable book yet.

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Short Stories

• Homeland and Other Stories (1991)
  With the same sensibilities that have come to characterize her highly praised novels, Kingsolver gives us a rich collection of twelve stories. Spreading her memorable characters over landscapes ranging from northern California to the hills of eastern Kentucky and the Caribbean island of St. Lucia, Kingsolver tells stories of hope, momentary joy, and powerful endurance. In every setting, Kingsolver's distinctive voice -- at times comic, but often heartrending -- rings true as she explores the twin themes of family ties and the life choices one must ultimately make alone. Homeland and Other Stories creates a world of love and possibility that readers will want to take as their own.

Non-fiction

• Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life (2007) by Barbara Kingsolver, Camille Kingsolver, and Steven L. Hopp
  Bestselling author Barbara Kingsolver returns with her first nonfiction narrative that will open your eyes in a hundred new ways to an old truth: You are what you eat.
  
  Hang on for the ride: With characteristic poetry and pluck, Barbara Kingsolver and her family sweep readers along on their journey away from the industrial-food pipeline to a rural life in which they vow to buy only food raised in their own neighborhood, grow it themselves, or learn to live without it. Their good-humored search yields surprising discoveries about turkey sex life and overly zealous zucchini plants, en route to a food culture that's better for the neighborhood and also better on the table. Part memoir, part journalistic investigation, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle makes a passionate case for putting the kitchen back at the center of family life and diversified farms at the center of the American diet.

• Small Wonder (2003)
  In her new essay collection, Barbara Kingsolver 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.

• Last Stand: America's Virgin Lands (2002) with Annie Griffiths Belt, Photographer
  Last Stand takes readers from the tallgrass prairies of Kansas to the Arctic tundra of Alaska to the deserts of the Southwest and bears passionate witness to our last wildernesses, reminding us why they must be preserved.
  
  Dedicated conservationist and acclaimed novelist Barbara Kingsolver teams with National Geographic photographer Annie Griffiths Belt to capture the essence of America's endangered virgin lands. In her moving introduction and in the essays opening each chapter, Kingsolver deftly explores the ways of the wilderness, the threats against it, and what it needs to survive. Griffiths Belt's accompanying hand-tinted infrared photographs breathtakingly evoke the spirit and beauty of these diverse bioregions.

• Holding the Line: Women in the Great Arizona Mine Strike of 1983 (1996)
  Novelist Barbara Kingsolver began her writing career with Holding the Line. It is the story of how women's lives were transformed by an eighteen-month strike against the Phelps Dodge Copper Corporation. Set in the small mining towns of Arizona, the story is partly oral history and partly social criticism, exploring the process of empowerment that occurs when people work together as a community.

• High Tide in Tucson: Essays from Now or Never (1995)
  In High Tide in Tucson, Kingsolver returns to her familiar themes of family, community, the common good and the natural world. The title essay considers Buster, a hermit crab that accidentally stows away on Kingsolver's return trip from the Bahamas to her desert home, and turns out to have manic-depressive tendencies. When Buster is running around for all he's worth, the author can only presume it's high tide in Tucson. Kingsolver brings a moral vision and refreshing sense of humor to subjects ranging from modern motherhood to the history of private property to the suspended citizenship of human beings in the Animal Kingdom.

Poetry

• Another America/Otra America (1992) by Barbara Kingsolver and Rebeca Cartes
  A deeply moving and beautifully crafted exploration of American society and our individual place within it. With stunning imagery, the poems give voice to themes ranging from resistance to violence and war to finding one's inner courage and strength as a woman. As in her fiction, Kingsolver's poetry rings with a richness of language and spirit, eloquently expressing her insights with compassion.

See also:

• Reading, Learning, Teaching Barbara Kingsolver (2005) by P. L. Thomas

• The Bookclub-in-a-Box Discussion Guide to The Poisonwood Bible, the Novel by Barbara Kingsolver (2005)

• Barbara Kingsolver: A Literary Companion (2004) by Mary Ellen Snodgrass
  This work is an introduction and overview of the author’s literary achievements, opening with an annotated chronology of Kingsolver’s life, activism, works, and awards, followed by a family tree. The 122 alphabetical entries in the main text provide data and analysis on characters, dates, historical figures and events, allusions, literary motifs, and themes from Kingsolver’s works, combining insights with generous citations from primary and secondary sources. Each entry concludes with a selected bibliography. Appendices include a timeline of events in The Poisonwood Bible, a list of 46 writing and research topics, a bibliography, and a comprehensive index.

• Spain: The Best Travel Writing from the New York Times (2001)
  Authors include Alan Riding, Angel Luis Page Alvaro, Angel de las Heras Sampayo, Anthony Burgess, Barbara Kingsolver, Benjamin Jones, Deborah Mason, Edward Schumacher, Frank J. Prial, Frederic Raphael, Herbert Muschamp, Hugh Thomas, James M. Markham, Joan Gould, Katharine Lee Bates, Leslie Stainton,.Malcolm Bradbury, Michael Mewshaw, Olivier Bernier, Penelope Casas, Rachel Billington, and V. S. Pritchett

• The Best American Short Stories 2001 (2001), Barbara Kingsolver and Katrina Kenison, eds.

• I've Always Meant to Tell You: Letters to Our Mothers -- An Anthology of Contemporary Women Writers (1997), Constance Warloe, ed.