Where to start with Barbara Kingsolver

American novelist, born 1955. Won the Women's Prize for Fiction in 2010 and 2023 and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2023.

Best Barbara Kingsolver book to start with: The Poisonwood Bible (1998), on 5 of the 19 lists it could have made.

The Poisonwood Bible is her best-loved book and the best way in. A missionary family moves to the Congo in 1959, and the story is told by the mother and four daughters in turn, so you hear the same events from several angles. It was shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction and the Pulitzer Prize in 1999. It is long, but the voices are distinct and easy to follow.

Demon Copperhead is the newer book, and it won both the Women’s Prize and the Pulitzer Prize in 2023. It retells David Copperfield in modern Appalachia. It helps to have read Dickens, though it works without him.

Flight Behaviour, shortlisted for the Women’s Prize in 2013, is the shortest of the four and the one to pick if you want something quicker. A young mother in rural Tennessee finds an unexpected arrival of butterflies, with climate change in the background. The Lacuna won the Women’s Prize in 2010, moves between Mexico and the United States, and is the most demanding, so it suits a reader who has already enjoyed her other books.