Flight Behaviour A Novel

Kingsolver, Barbara

ISBN 10: 0571290779 / ISBN 13: 9780571290772

Published by Faber & Faber, London, 2012

About this Item

Some shelf wear and tear to unclipped DJ with some loss to front fly, light scuffing to boards, paper lightly edge toned with minor foxing to edges of reading block. ; Third printing of Faber first UK edition, 2012. Black cloth boards with gilt lettering to spine, orange endpapers, no names or marks inside. DJ design by Faber. Heavy book and priced accordingly. ; 448 pages; In a hidden valley in the Appalachian Mountains near her home Dellarobia Turnbow discovers an amazing sight. The forested valley appears to be filled with a lake of fire! It is in fact a beautiful and terrible marvel of nature: the monarch butterflies have not migrated south for the winter. Is this a miraculous message from God, or a spectacular sign of climate change. 161 X 36 X 240 millimeters. Seller Inventory # 36990

Bibliographic Details

Title: Flight Behaviour A Novel

Publisher: Faber & Faber, London

Publication Date: 2012

Binding: Hardcover

Condition: Very Good

Dust Jacket Condition: Fair

Edition: First British Edition; Third Printing.

About this title

Synopsis:

Flight Behavior is a brilliant and suspenseful novel set in present day Appalachia; a breathtaking parable of catastrophe and denial that explores how the complexities we inevitably encounter in life lead us to believe in our particular chosen truths. Kingsolver's riveting story concerns a young wife and mother on a failing farm in rural Tennessee who experiences something she cannot explain, and how her discovery energizes various competing factions—religious leaders, climate scientists, environmentalists, politicians—trapping her in the center of the conflict and ultimately opening up her world. Flight Behavior is arguably Kingsolver's must thrilling and accessible novel to date, and like so many other of her acclaimed works, represents contemporary American fiction at its finest.

Review:

Amazon Best Books of the Month, November 2012: In what may be the first novel to realistically imagine the near-term impact of “global weirding,” Barbara Kingsolver sets her latest story in rural Appalachia . In fictional Feathertown, Tennessee, Dellarobia Turnbow--on the run from her stifling life--charges up the mountain above her husband’s family farm and stumbles onto a “valley of fire” filled with millions of monarch butterflies. This vision is deemed miraculous by the town’s parishioners, then the international media. But when Ovid, a scientist who studies monarch behavior, sets up a lab on the Turnbow farm, he learns that the butterflies’ presence signals systemic disorder--and Dellarobia's in-laws’ logging plans won’t help. Readers who bristle at politics made personal may be turned off by the strength of Kingsolver’s convictions, but she never reduces her characters to mouthpieces, giving equal weight to climate science and human need, to forces both biological and biblical. Her concept of family encompasses all living beings, however ephemeral, and Flight Behavior gracefully, urgently contributes to the dialogue of survival on this swiftly tilting planet. --Mari Malcolm