Audio: Barbara Kingsolver Reads From 'Prodigal Summer'Īrbara Kingsolver's new novel is all about sex, and she doesn't waste much time on foreplay.Agent: Frances Goldin, Goldin Literary Agency (Nov.Barbara Kingsolver's novel explores a variety of mating rituals. As Dellarobia flees into a belated coming-of-age, which becomes the ironic outcome of the Monarchs’ flight path to possible catastrophe in the collapse of a continental ecosystem, the dramatic saga becomes a clarion call about climate change, too lucid and vivid for even skeptics to ignore.

Kingsolver also animates and never judges the uneducated, superstitious, religiously devout residents of Feathertown. Spunky Dellarobia is immensely appealing the caustic view she holds of her husband, in-laws, and neighbors, the self-deprecating repartee she has with her best friend Dovey, and her views about the tedium of motherhood combined with a loving but clear-eyed appraisal of her own children invest the narrative with authenticity and sparkling humor. As her horizons expand, she faces a choice between the status quo and, perhaps, personal fulfillment. Already restless in her marriage to the passive Cub, for whom she gave up college when she became pregnant at 17, unsophisticated, cigarette-addicted Dellarobia takes a mammoth leap when she starts working with the research team. Equally threatening is the fact that her father-in-law, Bear, has sold the land to loggers. But the arrival of a research team led by sexy scientist Ovid Byron reveals the troubling truth behind the butterflies’ presence: they’ve been driven by pollution from their usual Mexican winter grounds and now face extinction due to northern hemisphere temperatures. The sight that young wife and mother Dellarobia Turnbow comes upon-millions of monarch butterflies glowing like a “lake of fire” in a sheep pasture owned by her in-laws-is immediately branded a miracle, and promises a lucrative tourist season for the financially beleaguered Turnbows. Set in a rural Tennessee that has endured unseasonal rain, the plot explores the effects of a bizarre biological event on a Bible Belt community. With her powerful new novel, Kingsolver (The Lacuna) delivers literary fiction that conveys an urgent social message.

Kingsolver's new book