Prodigal Summer: Deluxe Modern Classic - Softcover

Kingsolver, Barbara

Softcover

ISBN 10: 006227404X ISBN 13: 9780062274045

Publisher: Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2013

Synopsis

In her bestselling novel Prodigal Summer, Barbara Kingsolver weaves together three stories of human love within a larger tapestry of lives inhabiting the forested mountains and struggling small farms of southern Appalachia.

Award-winning author of Flight Behavior, The Lacuna, and The Poisonwood Bible, Kingsolver here introduces a wildlife biologist whose reclusive life in a mountain cabin is disrupted by a young hunter; a city girl-turned-farmer’s wife who must decide whether or not to fight for the land she now inhabits; and a pair of feuding, elderly neighbors who forge a bond neither of them could have predicted.

As the humid summer progresses, the characters grow closer to each other and the nature that surrounds them in this beautifully-written work that helped solidify Barbara Kingsolver’s place in the literary firmament.

This Harper Perennial Deluxe Modern Classic edition features beautiful cover artwork on uncoated stock, French flaps, and deckle-edge pages.

About this title

Review:

There is no one in contemporary literature quite like Barbara Kingsolver. Her dialogue sparkles with sassy wit and earthy poetry; her descriptions are rooted in daily life but are also on familiar terms with the eternal. With Prodigal Summer, she returns from the Congo to a "wrinkle on the map that lies between farms and wildness." And there, in an isolated pocket of southern Appalachia, she recounts not one but three intricate stories.

Exuberant, lush, riotous--the summer of the novel is "the season of extravagant procreation" in which bullfrogs carelessly lay their jellied masses of eggs in the grass, "apparently confident that their tadpoles would be able to swim through the lawn like little sperms," and in which a woman may learn to "tell time with her skin." It is also the summer in which a family of coyotes moves into the mountains above Zebulon Valley:

The ghost of a creature long extinct was coming in on silent footprints, returning to the place it had once held in the complex anatomy of this forest like a beating heart returned to its body. This is what she believed she would see, if she watched, at this magical juncture: a restoration.

The "she" is Deanna Wolfe, a wildlife biologist observing the coyotes from her isolated aerie--isolated, that is, until the arrival of a young hunter who makes her even more aware of the truth that humans are only an infinitesimal portion in the ecological balance. This truth forms the axis around which the other two narratives revolve: the story of a city girl, entomologist, and new widow and her efforts to find a place for herself; and the story of Garnett Walker and Nannie Rawley, who seem bent on thrashing out the countless intimate lessons of biology as only an irascible traditional farmer and a devotee of organic agriculture can. As Nannie lectures Garnett, "Everything alive is connected to every other by fine, invisible threads. Things you don't see can help you plenty, and things you try to control will often rear back and bite you, and that's the moral of the story."

Structurally, that gossamer web is the story: images, phrases, and events link the narratives, and these echoes are rarely obvious, always serendipitous. Kingsolver is one of those authors for whom the terrifying elegance of nature is both aesthetic wonder and source of a fierce and abiding moral vision. She may have inherited Thoreau's mantle, but she piles up riches of her own making, blending her extravagant narrative gift with benevolent concise humor. She treads the line between the sentimental and the glorious like nobody else in American literature. --Kelly Flynn

From the Back Cover:

Barbara Kingsolver's fifth novel is a hymn to wildness that celebrates the prodigal spirit of human nature, and of nature itself. It weaves together three stories of human love within a larger tapestry of lives amid the mountains and farms of southern Appalachia. Over the course of one humid summer, this novel's intriguing protagonists face disparate predicaments but find connections to one another and to the flora and fauna with which they necessarily share a place.

About this edition

• Publisher: Harper Perennial Modern Classics
• Publication date: 2013
• ISBN 10: 006227404X
• ISBN 13: 9780062274045
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 480