Celebrate the world of Barbara Kingsolver! Along with the newly released paperback of The Lacuna, Kingsolver’s beloved books, The Poisonwood Bible, Prodigal Summer, The Bean Trees, and Animal, Vegetable, Miracle will also be a part of the blog tour.
About The Lacuna
In her most accomplished novel, Barbara Kingsolver takes us on an epic journey from the Mexico City of artists Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo to the America of Pearl Harbor, FDR, and J. Edgar Hoover. The Lacuna is a poignant story of a man pulled between two nations as they invent their modern identities.
Born in the United States, reared in a series of provisional households in Mexico—from a coastal island jungle to 1930s Mexico City—Harrison Shepherd finds precarious shelter but no sense of home on his thrilling odyssey. Life is whatever he learns from housekeepers who put him to work in the kitchen, errands he runs in the streets, and one fateful day, by mixing plaster for famed Mexican muralist Diego Rivera. He discovers a passion for Aztec history and meets the exotic, imperious artist Frida Kahlo, who will become his lifelong friend. When he goes to work for Lev Trotsky, an exiled political leader fighting for his life, Shepherd inadvertently casts his lot with art and revolution, newspaper headlines and howling gossip, and a risk of terrible violence.
Meanwhile, to the north, the United States will soon be caught up in the internationalist goodwill of World War II. There in the land of his birth, Shepherd believes he might remake himself in America’s hopeful image and claim a voice of his own. He finds support from an unlikely kindred soul, his stenographer, Mrs. Brown, who will be far more valuable to her employer than he could ever know. Through darkening years, political winds continue to toss him between north and south in a plot that turns many times on the unspeakable breach—the lacuna—between truth and public presumption.
With deeply compelling characters, a vivid sense of place, and a clear grasp of how history and public opinion can shape a life, Barbara Kingsolver has created an unforgettable portrait of the artist—and of art itself. The Lacuna is a rich and daring work of literature, establishing its author as one of the most provocative and important of her time.
About The Poisonwood Bible
The Poisonwood Bible is a story told by the wife and four daughters of Nathan Price, a fierce, evangelical Baptist who takes his family and mission to the Belgian Congo in 1959. They carry with them everything they believe they will need from home, but soon find that all of it — from garden seeds to Scripture — is calamitously transformed on African soil. What follows is a suspenseful epic of one family’s tragic undoing and remarkable reconstruction over the course of three decades in postcolonial Africa.
About Prodigal Summer
Barbara Kingsolver’s fifth novel is a hymn to wildness that celebrates the prodigal spirit of human nature, and of nature itself. It weaves together three stories of human love within a larger tapestry of lives amid the mountains and farms of southern Appalachia. Over the course of one humid summer, this novel’s intriguing protagonists face disparate predicaments but find connections to one another and to the flora and fauna with which they necessarily share a place.
About The Bean Trees
Clear-eyed and spirited, Taylor Greer grew up poor in rural Kentucky with the goals of avoiding pregnancy and getting away. But when she heads west with high hopes and a barely functional car, she meets the human condition head-on. By the time Taylor arrives in Tucson, Arizona, she has acquired a completely unexpected child, a three-year-old American Indian girl named Turtle, and must somehow come to terms with both motherhood and the necessity for putting down roots. Hers is a story about love and friendship, abandonment and belonging, and the discovery of surprising resources in apparently empty places.
About Animal, Vegetable, Miracle
Author Barbara Kingsolver and her family abandoned the industrial-food pipeline to live a rural life—vowing that, for one year, they’d only buy food raised in their own neighborhood, grow it themselves, or learn to live without it. Part memoir, part journalistic investigation, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle is an enthralling narrative that will open your eyes in a hundred new ways to an old truth: You are what you eat.
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About Barbara Kingsolver
Barbara Kingsolver is the author of seven works of fiction, including the novels The Lacuna, The Poisonwood Bible, Animal Dreams, and The Bean Trees, as well as books of poetry, essays, and creative nonfiction. Her most recent work of nonfiction is the enormously influential bestseller Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life. Kingsolver’s work has been translated into more than twenty languages and has earned literary awards and a devoted readership at home and abroad. In 2000, she was awarded the National Humanities Medal, our country’s highest honor for service through the arts. She lives with her family on a farm in southern Appalachia.
Learn more about Barbara Kingsolver at her website.
Barbara Kingsolver’s TLC Book Tours TOUR STOPS
Tuesday, September 7th: Literate Housewife (The Poisonwood Bible)
Wednesday, September 8th: Lit and Life (The Lacuna)
Thursday, September 9th: Bibliofreak (The Bean Trees)
Monday, September 13th: Presenting Lenore (The Lacuna)
Tuesday, September 14th: Fyrefly’s Book Blog (Animal, Vegetable, Miracle)
Friday, September 17th: My Two Blessings (The Poisonwood Bible)
Monday, September 20th: Til We Read Again (The Lacuna)
Thursday, September 23rd: Rundpinne (The Bean Trees)
Tuesday, September 28th: Raging Bibliomania (The Lacuna)
Tuesday, September 28th: The Lost Entwife (The Lacuna)
Wednesday, September 29th: Steph and Tony Investigate (The Poisonwood Bible)
Thursday, September 30th: Wordsmithonia (Animal, Vegetable, Miracle)
Friday, October 1st: In the Next Room (The Lacuna)
Monday, October 4th: Caribousmom (Prodigal Summer)
Tuesday, October 5th: Bookworm’s Dinner (The Lacuna)
Thursday, October 7th: she reads and reads (The Lacuna)
Monday, October 11th: Book Chatter (Animal, Vegetable, Miracle)
Monday, November 1st: Jenn’s Bookshelves (Prodigal Summer)
Kathryn Cole says
I just finished reading the Lacuna… what an amazing book. I was taken over by the writing style and story line. Now I want a sequel to the Lacuna. I want the rest of the story after Harrison Sheperd escapes and lives out his life.
Thankyou for a wonderful read.
Kathryn Cole
Portland Oregon