The Lacuna

by Barbara Kingsolver

Kingsolver’s bestselling, prize-winning sixth novel—released in 2009—is a complex construction built of journals ostensibly kept by a man called Harrison Shepherd and curated by a friend, Violet, after his death. Having been removed to post-revolution Mexico by his mother ahead of the Second World War, he works for Frida Kahlo and Diego Garcia, as they welcome the exiled Leon Trotsky. He becomes a bestselling author and returns to an increasingly hysterical United States in the midst of the ‘Red Scare’—and finds himself under intense pressure when he is tarred as a Communist. The Washington Post described it at the time of publication as “the most mature and ambitious” novel Kingsolver had ever written.