Homeland

The short stories in this collection are spread over landscapes ranging from northern California and the urban Southwest to the hills of eastern Kentucky and the Caribbean island of St Lucia. In every setting the characters are bound by a strong sense of place and the 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'. Homeland and Other Stories follows in the tradition of some of the great short story writers of our time, including Alice Munro, Flannery O'Connor and Annie Proulx. With disarming honesty - at times comic but often heartrending - Barbara Kingsolver emerges as a true master of the form.

Barbara Kingsolver's fourteen books of fiction, poetry and non-fiction include the novels the international bestseller The Poisonwood Bible, which is now considered a modern classic and was chosen as the best reading group novel ever at the Penguin/Orange Awards, and The Lacuna, which won the Orange Prize for Fiction in 2010. Her latest novel is Flight Behaviour.