Prodigal Summer

Over a single rain-soaked summer in the southern Appalachians, three loosely connected stories unfold. Deanna Wolfe, a wildlife biologist living alone on a mountain, finds her solitude broken by a young hunter and the coyotes she is trying to protect. Lusa Maluf Landowski, a city entomologist newly widowed, fights to hold on to her late husband's farm and his suspicious family. And Garnett Walker, an elderly orchardist, wages a slow, prickly war with his organic-gardening neighbor Nannie Rawley. Kingsolver braids the three together into a meditation on predators, pollination, fertility, and the stubborn interdependence of every living thing.