BOOKS
Barbara Kingsolver, who lives in southwest Virginia, turns out both highly praised fiction—, —and nonfiction, including the best seller. In her new novel, (Harper), she takes as inspiration , but sets it mostly in the 2000s in Lee County, Virginia, home to bean-and-cornbread suppers, Friday night football, and an economy that lurches from farming and coal mining to prescription pill swapping. Kingsolver’s nature writing gleams—moss in the deer-hunting woods, tobacco harvested by hand—as does her understanding of rural ways and overlooked histories, like that of the orphaned main character, whose olive skin, green eyes, and copper hair mark him as a Melungeon, a mixed-race group some call the “Lost Tribe of Appalachia.” This book is painful but hard to put down. Hope will pull you through.
