Prodigal Summer

PARTITA - THE HEARTRENDING NEW NOVEL FROM BARBARA KINGSOLVER - COMING OCTOBER 2026
WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE FOR FICTION
TWICE WINNER OF THE WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION
THE MULTI-MILLION COPY BESTSELLING AUTHOR

'A rich and compulsive read' Guardian
From the award-winning and internationally bestselling author of Demon Copperhead, The Lacuna and The Poisonwood Bible.

It is summer in the Appalachian mountains and love, desire and attraction are in the air. Nature, too, it seems, is not immune. From her outpost in an isolated mountain cabin, Deanna Wolfe, a reclusive wildlife biologist, watches a den of coyotes that have recently migrated into the region. She is caught off guard by a young hunter who invades her most private spaces and interrupts her self-assured, solitary life. On a farm several miles down the mountain, Lusa Maluf Landowski, a bookish city girl turned farmer's wife, finds herself marooned in a strange place where she must declare or lose her attachment to the land that has become her own. And a few more miles down the road, a pair of elderly feuding neighbours tend their respective farms and wrangle about God, pesticides, and the possibilities of a future neither of them expected. Over the course of one humid summer, these characters find their connections of love to one another and to the surrounding nature with which they share a place.
With its strong balance of narrative and drama, Prodigal Summer stands alongside Demon Copperhead, The Poisonwood Bible and The Lacuna as one of Barbara Kingsolver's finest works.

Barbara Kingsolver's fourteen books of fiction, poetry and non-fiction include the novels the international bestseller The Poisonwood Bible, which is now considered a modern classic and was chosen as the best reading group novel ever at the Penguin/Orange Awards, and The Lacuna, which won the Orange Prize for Fiction in 2010. Her latest novel is Flight Behaviour.