Over landscapes ranging from northern California and the urban Southwest to the hills of eastern Kentucky and the Caribbean island of St Lucia, Barbara Kingsolver tells stories of hope, momentary joy and powerful endurance. In every setting her characters are bound by a strong sense of place and the compelling ties of love and family history: a child accepts the impossible responsibility of remembering her Cherokee great-grandmother's dying culture; a quietly dissolving couple must fight ghosts of past expectations to reach one another; a tough Mexican American woman finds herself in jail because of her commitment to a family legacy of 'doing the right thing.' With disarming honesty - at times comic but often heartrending - Barbara Kingsolver creates a world of love and possibility into which the reader is irresistibly drawn.