Pigs in Heaven by Barbara Kingsolver

Pigs in Heaven by Barbara Kingsolver

"A novel full of miracles."  -- Newsweek

"Breathtaking. . . unforgettable. . . . This profound, funny, bighearted novel, in which people actually find love and kinship in surprising places, is also heavenly. . . . A rare feat and a triumph." -- Cosmopolitan

In Pigs in Heaven, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Barbara Kingsolver, recipient of the National Book Foundation's Medal for Distinguish Contribution to American Letters, picks up where her modern classic The Bean Trees left off and 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.

When six-year-old Turtle Greer witnesses a freak accident at the Hoover Dam, her insistence on what she has seen and her mother's belief in her lead to a man's dramatic rescue. But Turtle's moment of celebrity draws her into a conflict of historic proportions. The crisis quickly envelops not only Turtle and her mother, Taylor, but everyone else who touches their lives in a complex web connecting their future with their past.

Pigs in Heaven travels the roads from rural Kentucky and the urban Southwest to Heaven, Oklahoma, and the Cherokee Nation as it draws the reader into a world of heartbreak and redeeming love, testing the boundaries of family and the many separate truths about the ties that bind.

Barbara Kingsolver's fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction publications have been widely translated and awarded numerous literary prizes. She founded the PEN/Bellwether Award and received the National Humanities Medal in 2000, the country's highest accolade for service to the arts. She studied and worked as a biologist before embarking on her writing career. She and her husband own and operate a farm in southern Appalachia.