Barbara Kingsolver's fifth novel is a hymn to wildness that celebrates the prodigal spirit of human nature, and of nature itself. It weaves together three stories of human love within a larger tapestry of lives amid the mountains and farms of southern Appalachia. Over the course of one humid summer, this novel's intriguing protagonists face disparate predicaments but find connections to one another and to the flora and fauna with which they necessarily...

An Ode to a Vanished Way of Life on the Nebraska Plains. 'I'd have liked to have you for a sweetheart, or a wife, or my mother or my sister: anything a woman can be to a man. The idea of you is part of my mind; you influence my likes and dislikes, all my tastes, hundreds of times when I don't realize it. You really are a part of me.' In Willa Cather's My Antonia, Jim Burden reflects on his childhood on the Nebraska prairie and the unforgettable girl...

The story of a Chinese peasant and his passionate, dogged accumulation of land during famine, drought, and revolution.

In Wisconsin, fourth-grader Ida B spends happy hours being home-schooled and playing in her family's apple orchard, until her mother begins treatment for breast cancer and her parents must sell part of the orchard and send her to public school.

Although McGillicuddy the kangaroo cannot produce wool or milk or lay eggs, the other animals learn that kangaroos can bring special skills to the farm.

Fern is a young farm girl who rescues the runt, Wilbur. Wilbur the pig is saved from certain death and Fern visits him every day at her Uncle Homer's farm. But it's Wilbur's friendship with Charlotte the spider that ultimately saves him from the "smoke house." Charlotte's talent for weaving praiseworthy words about Wilbur into her web turns the Zuckerman farm into a tourist attraction.

When Farmer Gray goes away for the day, Blue Goose, Red Hen, Yellow Chick, and White Duck get together and paint their black and white farm.

A sophisticated young woman moves to the English countryside in the 1930s and attempts to impose her urban lifestyle on her rural hosts.

When a drought tests the commitment of a mail-order bride from Maine to her new home on the prairie, her stepchildren hope they will be able to remain a family.