She also took one creative writing course, and became active in the last anti-Vietnam War protests. Kingsolver left Kentucky to attend DePauw University in Indiana, where she majored in biology. It was inconceivable that I might grow up to be one of those myself.' Besides, the writers she read, she once explained, 'were mostly old, dead men.

Growing up in a rural place, where work centered mainly on survival, writing didn't seem to be a practical career choice. Still, it never occurred to Kingsolver that she could become a professional writer. Kingsolver has always been a storyteller: 'I used to beg my mother to let me tell her a bedtime story.' As a child, she wrote stories and essays and, beginning at the age of eight, kept a journal religiously. 'The options were limited-grow up to be a farmer or a farmer's wife.' While her family has deep roots in the region, she never imagined staying there herself. She grew up 'in the middle of an alfalfa field,' in the part of eastern Kentucky that lies between the opulent horse farms and the impoverished coal fields. Education-B.A., DePauw University M.S., University ofīarbara Kingsolver was born on April 8, 1955.With the complexity that characterizes Barbara Kingsolver's finest work, Prodigal Summer embraces pure thematic originality and demonstrates a balance of narrative, drama, and ideas that render it an inspiring work of fiction. Over the course of one humid summer, as the urge to procreate overtakes the countryside, these characters find their connections to one another and to the flora and fauna with whom they share a place. 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.Īnd 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 of a future neither of them expected.

She is caught off-guard by a young hunter who invades her most private spaces and confounds her self-assured, solitary life. 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. 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.

Prodigal summer book