The Bean Trees

“The Bean Trees is the work of a visionary. . . . It leaves you open-mouthed and smiling.” — Los Angeles Times A bestseller that has come to be regarded as an American classic, The Bean Trees is the novel that launched Barbara Kingsolver’s remarkable literary career. It is the charming, engrossing tale of rural Kentucky native Taylor Greer, who only wants to get away from her roots and avoid getting pregnant. She succeeds, but inherits a three-year-old Native American girl named Turtle along the way, and together, from Oklahoma to Arizona, half-Cherokee Taylor and her charge search for a new life in the West. Hers is a story about love and friendship, abandonment and belonging, and the discovery of surprising resources in seemingly empty places. This edition includes a P.S. section with additional insights from the author, background material, suggestions for further reading, and more.

Young, bright Taylor Greer leaves her poverty-stricken life in Kentucky and heads west, picking up an abandoned Native American baby girl whom she names Turtle and finds a new home in Tucson with Mattie, an old woman who takes in Central American refugees

Picking up where her modern classic The Bean Trees left off, Barbara Kingsolver’s bestselling Pigs in Heaven continues the tale of Turtle and Taylor Greer, a Native American girl and her adoptive mother who have settled in Tucson, Arizona, as they both try to overcome their difficult pasts. Taking place three years after The Bean Trees, Taylor is now dating a musician named Jax and has officially adopted Turtle. But when a lawyer for the Cherokee Nation begins to investigate the adoption—their new life together begins to crumble. Depicting the clash between fierce family love and tribal law, poverty and means, abandonment and belonging, Pigs in Heaven is a morally wrenching, gently humorous work of fiction that speaks equally to the head and the heart. This edition includes a P.S. section with additional insights from Barbara Kingsolver, background material, suggestions for further reading, and more.

One woman’s quest to defend her culture. Haunted by the Roman attack that destroyed her home, Ailia flees to the remote Welsh mountains in search of the charismatic war king, Caradog, who is leading a guerrilla campaign against the encroaching army. Ailia proves herself an indispensable advisor to the war king, but as the bond between them deepens, she realises the terrible role she must play to save the soul of her country. Set in Iron-Age Britain, Songwoman is a powerful exploration of the ties between people and their land and what happens when they are broken. Ilka Tampke teaches fiction at RMIT University. Her first novel, Skin, was published in eight countries and was nominated for the Voss Literary Prize and the Aurealis Awards in 2016. Ilka lives on five acres in the Macedon Ranges of Victoria. ‘Vivid world-building, a seamless blend of research and imagination, and the heightened lexicon of fantasy lend a beguiling lustre to this Iron Age saga.’ Age ‘Songwoman is a sparkling piece of writing, shot through with complex moral struggles and questions about what it means to belong to a place. Ilka Tampke transported me into the mind of Ailia, into her intense relationship with war king Caradog and her even more intense relationship with the land. Fine-tuned historical research blends seamlessly into this gripping story of a young woman fighting to stop the destruction of her home.’ Jane Rawson, author of From the Wreck ‘Those who root for Game of Thrones’ Daenerys Targaryen will find much to love in Ailia’s personal quest, with Tampke more successfully navigating the realms of almost fantasy than Ishiguro, marking her out as an exciting talent to watch.’ New Daily on Skin ‘[Tampke’s] vision is clear and brought to life vividly through the strength of her singular heroine. We have no heard the last from this resonant new Australian voice.’ Readings on Skin ‘Fantasy lovers will enjoy the mysticism and world building, and historical fiction readers will appreciate the Roman invasion story line.’ Booklist on Skin ‘Tampke has created a visceral tale of ritual, magic and violence.’ Sunday Times on Skin

New York Times Bestseller • A Best Book of the Year: New York Times, Chicago Tribune, San Francisco Chronicle, Seattle Times, and Kansas City Star • Winner of the Orange Prize “Breathtaking. . . dazzling.” — New York Times Book Review “Her best novel yet. . . both epic and deeply personal. . . . This is thought-provoking, and potentially thought-changing, historical fiction at its best.” — Dallas Morning News In this powerfully imagined, provocative novel, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Barbara Kingsolver takes us on an epic journey from the Mexico of artists Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo to the America of Pearl Harbor, FDR, and J. Edgar Hoover. The Lacuna is the poignant story of a man pulled between two nations as well as an unforgettable portrait of the artist—and of art itself. Born in the United States, raised in Mexico, Harrison Shepherd lacks a sense of home in either. Life is whatever he learns from housekeepers who put him to work in the kitchen; from 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 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. 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, Kingsolver has created a rich and daring work of literature, establishing its author as one of the most provocative and important of her time.

** DEMON COPPERHEAD - THE NEW BARBARA KINGSOLVER NOVEL - IS AVAILABLE NOW** THE MULTI-MILLION COPY SELLING AUTHOR " We wanted to live in a place that could feed us: where rain falls, crops grow, and drinking water bubbles up right out of the ground." Barbara Kingsolver opens her home to us, as she and her family attempt a year of eating only local food, much of it from their own garden. Inspired by the flavours and culinary arts of a local food culture, they explore many a farmers market and diversified organic farms at home and across the country. With characteristic warmth, Kingsolver shows us how to put food back at the centre of the political and family agenda. Animal, Vegetable, Miracle is part memoir, part journalistic investigation, and is full of original recipes that celebrate healthy eating, sustainability and the pleasures of good food.

Edited this year by acclaimed poet and writer Doty, the foremost annual anthology of contemporary American poetry returns. It is an essential guide to contemporary American verse and the poets who define it.

A novel of a down-and-out New England family that “seizes the reader on its opening page with . . . a knock-about country humor unmistakably its own” (Newsweek). There are families like the Beans all over America. They live on the wrong side of town in mobile homes strung with Christmas lights all year round. The women are often pregnant, the men drunk and just out of jail, and the children too numerous to count. In this novel that “pulses with kinetic energy,” we meet the God-fearing Earlene Pomerleau, and experience her obsession with the whole swarming Bean tribe (Newsweek). There is cousin Rubie, a boozer and a brawler; tall Aunt Roberta, the earth mother surrounded by countless clinging babies; and Beal, sensitive, often gentle, but doomed by the violence within him. In The Beans of Egypt, Maine, Carolyn Chute—whose jobs included waitress, chicken factory worker, and hospital floor scrubber before gaining renown as a prize-winning novelist—creates “a fictional world so vivid and compelling that one feels at a loss when it ends. The Beans belong with the Snopes clan of Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County, with Erskine Caldwell’s white Southerners, and with the rural blacks of Alice Walker’s The Color Purple” (San Jose Mercury News).