Barbara Kingsolver
Barbara Kingsolver (born 1955) is an American novelist, essayist and poet.
Books by Barbara Kingsolver
“Barbara Kingsolver (The Poisonwood Bible, Flight Behaviour)…returns with Demon Copperhead, which reimagines Charles Dickens‘s David Copperfield as set in the Appalachian Mountains, transposing that Victorian melodrama into a world of trailer parks, opioid crisis and a creaking foster care system. A true saga with a cast of thousands. Compulsively readable” Read more...
Notable New Novels of Fall 2022
Cal Flyn, Journalist
“One of the things that’s fascinating about Flight Behaviour is that at at least on the surface it offers a counter-example Ghosh’s argument social realism is not fit for purpose when it comes to climate change. After all, here is a novel that is absolutely depicting the social realities of a small community through a fine-grained attention to the detail of individual lives. The only remarkable thing is the arrival of a flock of butterflies whose migration has been disrupted by climate change, and even that might well have been plucked from the pages of a newspaper. And in an odd way it’s precisely this attention to social reality that makes the novel so effective, and so interesting. Because what Kingsolver lets us see is the way small disruptions to natural cycles alter the world, often without us even being fully aware of it, gradually deranging and unsettling individuals and communities.” Read more...
The Best Climate Change Novels
James Bradley, Novelist
“It’s quite an old-fashioned story of sin and redemption, yet a hugely ambitious tale for Kingsolver to take on. It’s about filial responsibility as a wife and as daughters and sisters; it’s about guilt, bitterness and revenge.” Read more...
The best books on Displacement
Michelle Jana Chan, Novelist
Interviews where books by Barbara Kingsolver were recommended
The best books on Displacement, recommended by Michelle Jana Chan
A sense of displacement is at the heart of many of our greatest works of literature. Here Vanity Fair travel editor Michelle Jana Chan discusses five brilliant novels dealing with this theme that influenced her debut Song.
The best books on The Diplomat’s Wife, recommended by Brigid Keenan
The author discusses a varied selection of books about young women living abroad. Draws on her own experiences as a Diplomat’s Wife. Features Out of Africa and The Jewel In The Crown with three more travel classics
The Best Climate Change Novels, recommended by James Bradley
The best fiction allows us to hold ideas in our heads about time and space and causality and connection that are difficult to articulate in other ways, argues the Australian author James Bradley. It helps its readers engage with dangers and possibilities that are at the very edge of imagination
The Best Cli-Fi Books, recommended by Dan Bloom
Fiction that explores issues of climate change is growing at an unprecedented rate today, says the journalist who coined the phrase ‘cli-fi’, Dan Bloom. Here, he picks the five best books of the field, and introduces us to a globally important, underexplored literary genre
Notable New Novels of Fall 2022, recommended by Cal Flyn
Fall is a busy time in publishing, as the biggest names in fiction prepare to release new books in the months leading up to Christmas. Here, Five Books deputy editor Cal Flyn rounds up some of the most notable novels of Fall 2022—including two new books from the great American novelist Cormac McCarthy and a sumptuous work of historical fiction from Maggie O’Farrell.
