Barbara Kingsolver Books

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Barbara Kingsolver is an American author and essayist that writes historical fiction and non-fiction. She was born in 1955 in Annapolis. The first few years of her life were spent in Carlisle, Kentucky. But then she moved to Congo at the age of seven because of her father’s work. He was a doctor and he worked, along with Barbara’s mother, in public health.

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Order of Greer Family Series

# Read Title Published Details
1 The Bean Trees 1988 Description / Buy
2 Pigs in Heaven 1993 Description / Buy

Order of Barbara Kingsolver Standalone Novels

# Read Title Published Details
1 Animal Dreams 1990 Description / Buy
2 The Poisonwood Bible 1998 Description / Buy
3 Prodigal Summer 2000 Description / Buy
4 The Lacuna 2009 Description / Buy
5 Flight Behavior 2012 Description / Buy
6 Unsheltered 2018 Description / Buy
7 Demon Copperhead 2022 Description / Buy

Order of Barbara Kingsolver Short Story Collections

# Read Title Published Details
1 Another America/Otra America 1992 Description / Buy
2 How to Fly (Short Story) 2020 Description / Buy

Order of Barbara Kingsolver Non-Fiction

# Read Title Published Details
1 High Tide in Tucson: Essays from Now or Never 1995 Description / Buy
2 Holding the Line: Women in the Great Arizona Mine Strike of 1983 1996 Description / Buy
3 Small Wonder: Essays 2002 Description / Buy
4 Last Stand: America's Virgin Lands 2002 Description / Buy
5 Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: Our Year of Season Eating 2007 Description / Buy

Order of Barbara Kingsolver Children's Books

# Read Title Published Details
1 Coyote's Wild Home (Short Story) 2023 Description / Buy

Order of Faber Stories Series

# Read Title Published Details
1 A Good Man Is Hard To Find ( By: Flannery O'Connor) 1955 Description / Buy
2 The Inner Room (Short Story) ( By: Robert Aickman) 1968 Description / Buy
3 Daughters of Passion (Short Story) ( By: Julia O'Faolain) 1982 Description / Buy
4 Giacomo Joyce (Short Story) ( By: Richard Ellmann) 1983 Description / Buy
5 Homeland 1989 Description / Buy
6 Shanti (Short Story) ( By: Vikram Chandra) 1997 Description / Buy
7 Sonny Liston Was a Friend of Mine ( By: Thom Jones) 1998 Description / Buy
8 An Elegy for Easterly (Short Story) ( By: Petina Gappah) 2009 Description / Buy
9 The Shielding of Mrs Forbes (Short Story) ( By: Alan Bennett) 2011 Description / Buy
10 The Cheater's Guide to Love (Short Story) ( By: Junot Díaz) 2012 Description / Buy
11 Mrs Fox (Short Story) ( By: Sarah Hall) 2014 Description / Buy
12 Mostly Hero (Short Story) ( By: Anna Burns) 2014 Description / Buy
13 Mr Salary (Short Story) ( By: Sally Rooney) 2016 Description / Buy
14 Come Rain or Come Shine (Short Story) ( By: Kazuo Ishiguro) 2019 Description / Buy
15 The Victim (Short Story) ( By: P.D. James) 2019 Description / Buy
16 Dante and the Lobster (Short Story) ( By: Samuel Beckett) 2019 Description / Buy
17 Paradise (Short Story) ( By: Edna O'Brien) 2019 Description / Buy
18 Cosmopolitan (Short Story) ( By: Akhil Sharma) 2019 Description / Buy
19 The Lydia Steptoe Stories (Short Story) ( By: Djuna Barnes) 2019 Description / Buy
20 Mary Ventura and The Ninth Kingdom ( By: Sylvia Plath) 2019 Description / Buy
21 Terrific Mother (Short Story) ( By: Lorrie Moore) 2019 Description / Buy
22 The Country Funeral (Short Story) ( By: John McGahern) 2019 Description / Buy
23 The Forester's Daughter (Short Story) ( By: Claire Keegan) 2019 Description / Buy
24 Three Types of Solitude (Short Story) ( By: Brian W. Aldiss) 2019 Description / Buy
25 A River in Egypt (Short Story) ( By: David Means) 2019 Description / Buy
26 Fairy Tales (Short Story) ( By: Marianne Moore) 2019 Description / Buy
27 Ghostly Stories (Short Story) ( By: Celia Fremlin) 2019 Description / Buy
28 Intruders (Short Story) ( By: Adrian Tomine) 2019 Description / Buy
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Barbara Kingsolver Anthologies

# Read Title Published Details
1 Mid-life Confidential 1994 Description / Buy
2 The Eloquent Essay 2000 Description / Buy
3 Writers on Writing 2001 Description / Buy
4 The Best American Short Stories 2001 2001 Description / Buy
5 Touchstone Anthology of Contemporary Creative Nonfiction 2007 Description / Buy
6 The Maternal Is Political 2008 Description / Buy
7 Sisters 2009 Description / Buy
8 Hope Beneath Our Feet 2010 Description / Buy
9 To Eat with Grace 2014 Description / Buy
10 Way More than Luck 2015 Description / Buy
11 Plough Quarterly No. 4: Earth 2015 Description / Buy
12 Letters to a Young Farmer 2017 Description / Buy
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Life in Congo had its challenges. For instance, the family did not have access to running water or electricity. The author’s time in Congo eventually came to an end. A music scholarship got her into DePauw University in Greencastle, Indiana, and for a time, she pursued classical piano as a major.

It did not take her long to realize that the field couldn’t offer her the financial opportunities she desired. So she turned her attention to biology. As a young adult, when Barbara wasn’t studying, she was out making her opinions heard on important matters such as the Vietnam war.

After graduating with a Bachelor in Science, the writer studied Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Arizona. She started experimenting with writing during her university days.

At first, Barbara worked as a science writer for her university. Then she produced several cover stories for a local publication. This established Barbara as a freelance feature writer. She also wrote a short story that won a local contest.

After marrying her first husband (Joseph Hoffmann) in 1985, the family moved to Tenerife in the Canary Islands. Barbara Kingsolver’s first child, a daughter, was already born by this point. The move was necessitated by the author’s frustration over America’s involvement in the Gulf War.

Her first marriage ended in 1992. She married Steven Hopp, her second husband. in 1996. This marriage also produced a daughter. By this stage of her life, Barbara Kingsolver was already making headway as a published author.

Her first novel was titled ‘The Bean Trees’. It was published in 1988. She wrote it during her first pregnancy. She had insomnia, so she used the time to write the novel. She also wrote non-fiction works that were inspired by her life.

Every book she has written and published since 1993 has become a New York Times Bestseller. She finds her inspiration in the books she reads. Barbara did quite a bit of studying during her youth. But she never studied writing.

Everything she knows about writing she learned from reading. The author only reads books she would like to write. While some authors struggle to nurture the discipline required to sit down and write, Barbara has to fight to stop writing.

She has so many ideas in her head every morning that she cannot find peace until she sits down and puts them on paper. She doesn’t write every day because she has so many chores to do. Most of these chores are related to her publishing career. She relies heavily on Judy Carmicheal, her assistant who does what she can to create openings in Barbara’s schedule that she can use to write.

Barbara Kingsolver Awards

The author has received Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction, Oprah’s Book Club, Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, PEN/Faulkner, and International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award nominations. She has won the Orange Prize for Fiction and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize.

Best Barbara Kingsolver Books

The author has been commended for writing books that make historical events interesting to modern readers, with some of the best titles in her bibliography including:

Poisonwood Bible: Nathan Price was a passionate evangelical Baptist who went to Congo in 1959 to make a difference. He took his wife and children with him along with everything they thought they might need. Nathan’s story is told by his wife and children in this book. They chronicle the hardships they encountered and the transformations they underwent.

The Bean Trees: Taylor Greer was once innocent. After growing up in rural Kentucky, all she wanted was to avoid pregnancy long enough to escape. Then her chance came and she found herself in a battered car on the road to a new life.

But things in Tuscon, Arizona are not quite what she expected. Already the mother of an American Indian child, she has to overcome numerous hurdles to make a home for herself.

When Does The Next Barbara Kingsolver book come out?

Barbara Kingsolver doesn't seem to have an upcoming book. Their newest book is Coyote's Wild Home and was released on November, 28th 2023. It is the newest book in the Barbara Kingsolver Children's Books.

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1 thought on “Barbara Kingsolver”

  1. Too many of my thoughts were given life in Barbara’s essays. How is this possible? When the dark hopelessness begin to overwhelm me, I only need to read one of her books again to find some comfort, knowing there is someone in this world who seems to share my deepening despair over our country’s refusal to respond to the threat of our extinction. Her continued efforts are my hope.

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