Prodigal Summer by Barbara Kingsolver

Prodigal Summer is made up of three intertwined stories about the people living in a small rural community in Southern Appalachia. In the first story arc, “Predators,” we are introduced to Deanna Wolfe, a recently divorced wildlife biologist in her early forties who has hidden herself away in a remote mountain cabin to study the eastward migration of coyotes. When she meets Eddie Bondo, a young man bent on hunting her beloved predators, the physical responses of her body shock her out of her routine and eat away at her resolve to leave the world of people behind.

In “Moth Love,” Lusa Landowski is a young entomologist, half Jewish, half Arab, who has left the city to marry a tobacco farmer.  Only a year into her tumultuous marriage, she is widowed and stranded in a town that time seems to have forgotten. In defiance of her traditionalist in-laws, she decides to “finish what she started” and make her late husband’s farm into a livelihood and a home.

The final story, “Old Chestnuts,” follows Garnett Walker, a widowed farmer spending his declining years attempting to resurrect a disease-resistant strain of the dying American Chestnut tree. His neighbor Nannie Rawley operates an organic fruit orchard (in defiance of God’s will, he thinks), attends a Unitarian church (which Garnett is convinced must have something to do with witchcraft), and generally infuriates him with her disregard for convention. In the book’s gentlest passages, these two lonely farmers battle over trivialities, barely noticing how much they have in common.

More than a catalog of interesting small town characters, Prodigal Summer is about the place that people have in the natural world. Her gorgeous writing style draws parallels throughout between the rich inner lives of her characters and the natural ecosystem in which they live over the course of a fertile, abundant summer.

Recommended by Sara D.

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