Hardback: Flight Behaviour (2012) transfixes from its opening scene, when a young woman's narrow experience of life is thrown wide with the force of a raging fire. In the lyrical language of her native Appalachia, Barbara Kingsolver bares the rich, tarnished humanity of her novel's inhabitants and unearths the modern complexities of rural existence. Characters and reader alike are quickly carried beyond familiar territory here, into the unsettled ground of science, faith, and everyday truces between reason and conviction.
Dellarobia Turnbow is a restless farm wife who gave up her own plans when she accidentally became pregnant at seventeen. Now, after a decade of domestic disharmony on a failing farm, she has settled for permanent disappointment but seeks momentary escape through an obsessive flirtation with a younger man. As she hikes up a mountain road behind her house to a secret tryst, but instead encounters a shocking sight: a silent, forested valley filled with what looks like a lake of fire. She can only understand it as a cautionary miracle, but it sparks a raft of other explanations from scientists, religious leaders and the media. The bewildering emergency draws rural farmers into unexpected acquaintance with urbane journalists, opportunists, sightseers, and a striking biologist with his own stake in the outcome. As the community lines up to judge the woman and her miracle, Dellarobia confronts her family, her church, her town and a larger world, in a flight toward truth that could undo all she has ever believed.
Flight Behaviour takes on one of the most contentious subjects of our time: climate change. With a deft and versatile empathy, she dissects the motives that drive denial and belief in a precarious world.
Flight Behaviour was also nominated for the International Dublin Literary Award 2014, the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction 2013 in the Best Book category, the Goodreads Choice Awards Best Fiction 2012, a New York Times bestseller and was declared "Best book of the year" by the Washington Post and USA Today in 2012.
About the author: Barbara Kingsolver's work has been translated into more than twenty languages and has earned a devoted readership. In 2010, she won the Orange Prize for The Lacuna, a poignant story of a man pulled between two nations as they invent their modern identities. Before she made her living as a writer, Kingsolver earned degrees in biology and worked as a scientist. She now lives with her family on a farm in southern Appalachia. Flight Behaviour is her seventh novel.
Status: Unread/To-Be-Read
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