New York Times Bestseller • Listed as one of the year’s best books by Newsweek, Christian Science Monitor, San Francisco Chronicle, NPR, and O: The Oprah Magazine

“Kingsolver masterfully conveys the cost of significant transformation as well as how it can open the door for a radiant, unanticipated growth of the heart, as well as for future generations.” O: The magazine of Oprah

With a story about two families navigating what appears to be the end of the world as they know it in two centuries, the celebrated author of The Poisonwood Bible and The Bean Trees, who has won multiple literary honours, including the National Humanities Medal, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, and the National Book Foundation’s Medal for Distinguish Contribution to American Letters, returns. These people use history as their enticing canvas to create a strikingly current portrayal of life in unstable times when the foundations of the past have failed to foreshadow the future.

A woman asks, “How could two hard-working people do everything right in life and still end up penniless?” Despite being respectable parents and professionals, Willa Knox and her husband have nothing to show for their efforts other than debt and a dilapidated brick home they inherited. The college where Willa’s husband held tenure has closed, and the magazine where she worked has folded. A crippled father-in-law and a frustrated, free-spirited daughter have no choice but to stay at their questionable refuge. When catastrophe uproots the family’s only success story—an Ivy League-educated son—he appears likely to join them, albeit with his own set of troubling circumstances.

A distressed spouse and public servant asks, “How can a man tell the truth and be despised for it?” at another point in time. Thatcher Greenwood, a science instructor who is passionate about conducting frank research, is under pressure since his employer won’t let him discuss Charles Darwin’s recent groundbreaking findings. His socially aspirational mother-in-law and young bride are apprehensive about the possibility of scandal and brush off his concerns about their opulent home’s instability. Thatcher merely wants to carry out his duties in a community that was supposedly established as a kind utopia, but his friendships with a female scientist and a rebellious newspaper editor put him in danger of becoming embroiled in a feud with the town’s influential men.