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Harper
November 2012
On Sale: November 6, 2012
448 pages ISBN: 0062124269 EAN: 9780062124265 Kindle: B007HBY89E Hardcover / e-Book
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Fiction Family Life
Flight Behavior 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, she
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 Behavior takes on one of the most contentious
subjects of our time: climate change. With a deft and
versatile empathy Kingsolver dissects the motives that drive
denial and belief in a precarious world.
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