The Bean Trees A Novel

“The Bean Trees is the work of a visionary. . . . It leaves you open-mouthed and smiling.” — Los Angeles Times A bestseller that has come to be regarded as an American classic, The Bean Trees is the novel that launched Barbara Kingsolver’s remarkable literary career. It is the charming, engrossing tale of rural Kentucky native Taylor Greer, who only wants to get away from her roots and avoid getting pregnant. She succeeds, but inherits a three-year-old Native American girl named Turtle along the way, and together, from Oklahoma to Arizona, half-Cherokee Taylor and her charge search for a new life in the West. Hers is a story about love and friendship, abandonment and belonging, and the discovery of surprising resources in seemingly empty places. This edition includes a P.S. section with additional insights from the author, background material, suggestions for further reading, and more.

Mother and adopted daughter, Taylor and Turtle Greer, are back in this spellbinding sequel about family, heartbreak and love. Six-year-old Turtle Greer witnesses a freak accident at the Hoover Dam during a tour of the Grand Canyon with her guardian, Taylor. Her insistence on what she has seen, and her mother's belief in her, lead to a man's dramatic rescue. The mother and adopted daughter duo soon become nationwide heroes - even landing themselves a guest appearance on the Oprah Winfrey show. But Turtle's moment of celebrity draws her into a conflict of historic proportions stemming right back to her Cherokee roots. The crisis quickly envelops not only Turtle and her guardian, but everyone else who touches their lives in a complex web connecting their future with their past. Embark on a unforgettable road trip from rural Kentucky and the urban Southwest to Heaven, Oklahoma, and the Cherokee Nation, testing the boundaries of family and the many separate truths about the ties that bind.

“An emotional masterpiece . . . A novel in which humor, passion, and superb prose conspire to seize a reader by the heart and by the soul.” —New York Daily News From Barbara Kingsolver, the acclaimed author of Flight Behavior, The Lacuna, The Bean Trees, and other modern classics, Animal Dreams is a passionate and complex novel about love, forgiveness, and one woman’s struggle to find her place in the world "Animals dream about the things they do in the daytime just like people do. If you want sweet dreams, you've got to live a sweet life." So says Loyd Peregrina, a handsome Apache trainman and latter-day philosopher. But when Codi Noline returns to her hometown, Loyd's advice is painfully out of her reach. Dreamless and at the end of her rope, Codi comes back to Grace, Arizona, to confront her past and face her ailing, distant father. What she finds is a town threatened by a silent environmental catastrophe, some startling clues to her own identity, and a man whose view of the world could change the course of her life. Blending flashbacks, dreams, and Native American legends, Animal Dreams is a suspenseful love story and a moving exploration of life's largest commitments. This edition includes a P.S. section with additional insights from Barbara Kingsolver, background material, suggestions for further reading, and more.

One woman’s quest to defend her culture. Haunted by the Roman attack that destroyed her home, Ailia flees to the remote Welsh mountains in search of the charismatic war king, Caradog, who is leading a guerrilla campaign against the encroaching army. Ailia proves herself an indispensable advisor to the war king, but as the bond between them deepens, she realises the terrible role she must play to save the soul of her country. Set in Iron-Age Britain, Songwoman is a powerful exploration of the ties between people and their land and what happens when they are broken. Ilka Tampke teaches fiction at RMIT University. Her first novel, Skin, was published in eight countries and was nominated for the Voss Literary Prize and the Aurealis Awards in 2016. Ilka lives on five acres in the Macedon Ranges of Victoria. ‘Vivid world-building, a seamless blend of research and imagination, and the heightened lexicon of fantasy lend a beguiling lustre to this Iron Age saga.’ Age ‘Songwoman is a sparkling piece of writing, shot through with complex moral struggles and questions about what it means to belong to a place. Ilka Tampke transported me into the mind of Ailia, into her intense relationship with war king Caradog and her even more intense relationship with the land. Fine-tuned historical research blends seamlessly into this gripping story of a young woman fighting to stop the destruction of her home.’ Jane Rawson, author of From the Wreck ‘Those who root for Game of Thrones’ Daenerys Targaryen will find much to love in Ailia’s personal quest, with Tampke more successfully navigating the realms of almost fantasy than Ishiguro, marking her out as an exciting talent to watch.’ New Daily on Skin ‘[Tampke’s] vision is clear and brought to life vividly through the strength of her singular heroine. We have no heard the last from this resonant new Australian voice.’ Readings on Skin ‘Fantasy lovers will enjoy the mysticism and world building, and historical fiction readers will appreciate the Roman invasion story line.’ Booklist on Skin ‘Tampke has created a visceral tale of ritual, magic and violence.’ Sunday Times on Skin

“A powerful new epic . . . [Kingsolver] has with infinitely steady hands worked the prickly threads of religion, politics, race, sin and redemption into a thing of terrible beauty.” —Los Angeles Times Book Review The Poisonwood Bible is a story told by the wife and four daughters of Nathan Price, a fierce, evangelical Baptist who takes his family and mission to the Belgian Congo in 1959. They carry with them everything they believe they will need from home, but soon find that all of it—from garden seeds to Scripture—is calamitously transformed on African soil. What follows is a suspenseful epic of one family’s tragic undoing and remarkable reconstruction over the course of three decades in postcolonial Africa. The novel is set against one of the most dramatic political chronicles of the twentieth century: the Congo's fight for independence from Belgium, the murder of its first elected prime minister, the CIA coup to install his replacement, and the insidious progress of a world economic order that robs the fledgling African nation of its autonomy. Taking its place alongside the classic works of postcolonial literature, this ambitious novel establishes Kingsolver as one of the most thoughtful and daring of modern writers.

"We wanted to live in a place that could feed us: where rain falls, crops grow, and drinking water bubbles up right out of the ground." Barbara Kingsolver opens her home to us, as she and her family attempt a year of eating only local food, much of it from their own garden. Inspired by the flavours and culinary arts of a local food culture, they explore many a farmers market and diversified organic farms at home and across the country. With characteristic warmth, Kingsolver shows us how to put food back at the centre of the political and family agenda. Animal, Vegetable, Miracle is part memoir, part journalistic investigation, and is full of original recipes that celebrate healthy eating, sustainability and the pleasures of good food.

From the bestselling author of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and The BFG! Mr. and Mrs. Twit are the smelliest, nastiest, ugliest people in the world. They hate everything—except playing mean jokes on each other, catching innocent birds to put in their Bird Pies, and making their caged monkeys, the Muggle-Wumps, stand on their heads all day. But the Muggle-Wumps have had enough. They don't just want out, they want revenge.

Of Mice and Men is a novella written by John Steinbeck and first ublished in 1937. It chronicles the experiences of George Milton and Lennie Small, two displaced migrant ranch workers, who move from place to place in California in search of new job opportunities during the Great Depression in the United States. Steinbeck based the novella on his own experiences working alongside migrant farm workers as a teenager in the 1910s (before the arrival of the Okies that he would describe in The Grapes of Wrath). The title is taken from Robert Burns' poem "To a Mouse", which reads: "The best laid schemes o' mice an' men / Gang aft agley". (The best laid schemes of mice and men / Often go awry.) While it is a book taught in many schools, Of Mice and Men has been a frequent target of censors for vulgarity, and what some consider offensive and racist language; consequently, it appears on the American Library Association's list of the Most Challenged Books of the 21st Century.

"Nineteen Eighty-Four: A Novel", often published as "1984", is a dystopian social science fiction novel by English novelist George Orwell. It was published on 8 June 1949 by Secker & Warburg as Orwell's ninth and final book completed in his lifetime. Thematically, "Nineteen Eighty-Four" centres on the consequences of totalitarianism, mass surveillance, and repressive regimentation of persons and behaviours within society. Orwell, himself a democratic socialist, modelled the authoritarian government in the novel after Stalinist Russia. More broadly, the novel examines the role of truth and facts within politics and the ways in which they are manipulated. The story takes place in an imagined future, the year 1984, when much of the world has fallen victim to perpetual war, omnipresent government surveillance, historical negationism, and propaganda. Great Britain, known as Airstrip One, has become a province of a totalitarian superstate named Oceania that is ruled by the Party who employ the Thought Police to persecute individuality and independent thinking. Big Brother, the leader of the Party, enjoys an intense cult of personality despite the fact that he may not even exist. The protagonist, Winston Smith, is a diligent and skillful rank-and-file worker and Outer Party member who secretly hates the Party and dreams of rebellion. He enters into a forbidden relationship with a colleague, Julia, and starts to remember what life was like before the Party came to power.

This is a cultural history of mathematics and art, from antiquity to the present. Mathematicians and artists have long been on a quest to understand the physical world they see before them and the abstract objects they know by thought alone. Taking readers on a tour of the practice of mathematics and the philosophical ideas that drive the discipline, Lynn Gamwell points out the important ways mathematical concepts have been expressed by artists. Sumptuous illustrations of artworks and cogent math diagrams are featured in Gamwell's comprehensive exploration. Gamwell begins by describing mathematics from antiquity to the Enlightenment, including Greek, Islamic, and Asian mathematics. Then focusing on modern culture, Gamwell traces mathematicians' search for the foundations of their science, such as David Hilbert's conception of mathematics as an arrangement of meaning-free signs, as well as artists' search for the essence of their craft, such as Aleksandr Rodchenko's monochrome paintings. She shows that self-reflection is inherent to the practice of both modern mathematics and art, and that this introspection points to a deep resonance between the two fields: Kurt Gödel posed questions about the nature of mathematics in the language of mathematics and Jasper Johns asked "What is art?" in the vocabulary of art. Throughout, Gamwell describes the personalities and cultural environments of a multitude of mathematicians and artists, from Gottlob Frege and Benoît Mandelbrot to Max Bill and Xu Bing. Mathematics and Art demonstrates how mathematical ideas are embodied in the visual arts and will enlighten all who are interested in the complex intellectual pursuits, personalities, and cultural settings that connect these vast disciplines.

An updated edition of the best-selling highly illustrated garden plant reference, featuring more than 8,000 plants and 4,000 photographs. Choose the right plants for your garden and find all the inspiration and guidance you need with the Encyclopedia of Plants & Flowers. Drawing on expert advice from the RHS, this best-selling book features a photographic catalogue of more than 4,000 plants and flowers, all organized by color, size, and type, to help you select the right varieties for your outdoor space. Discover perennials, bulbs, shrubs, and trees, succulents, and ornamental shrubs, all showcased in beautiful, full-color photography. Browse this photographic catalogue to find at-a-glance plant choice inspiration. Or use the extensive plant dictionary to look up more than 8,000 plant varieties and the best growing conditions. This new edition features the latest and most popular cultivars, with more than 1,380 new plants added, as well as updated photography, comprehensive hardiness ratings, and a brand-new introduction. Fully comprehensive yet easy to use, the Encyclopedia of Plants & Flowers is the inspirational, informative guide every gardener needs on their bookshelf.

A novel of a down-and-out New England family that “seizes the reader on its opening page with . . . a knock-about country humor unmistakably its own” (Newsweek). There are families like the Beans all over America. They live on the wrong side of town in mobile homes strung with Christmas lights all year round. The women are often pregnant, the men drunk and just out of jail, and the children too numerous to count. In this novel that “pulses with kinetic energy,” we meet the God-fearing Earlene Pomerleau, and experience her obsession with the whole swarming Bean tribe (Newsweek). There is cousin Rubie, a boozer and a brawler; tall Aunt Roberta, the earth mother surrounded by countless clinging babies; and Beal, sensitive, often gentle, but doomed by the violence within him. In The Beans of Egypt, Maine, Carolyn Chute—whose jobs included waitress, chicken factory worker, and hospital floor scrubber before gaining renown as a prize-winning novelist—creates “a fictional world so vivid and compelling that one feels at a loss when it ends. The Beans belong with the Snopes clan of Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County, with Erskine Caldwell’s white Southerners, and with the rural blacks of Alice Walker’s The Color Purple” (San Jose Mercury News).

A New York Times Bestseller Named one of the Best Books of the Year (2018) by NPR, O, The Oprah Magazine, San Francisco Chronicle, Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek The New York Times bestselling author of Flight Behavior, The Lacuna, and The Poisonwood Bible and recipient of numerous literary awards—including the National Humanities Medal, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, and the Orange Prize—returns with a timely novel that interweaves past and present to explore the human capacity for resiliency and compassion in times of great upheaval. How could two hardworking people do everything right in life, a woman asks, and end up destitute? Willa Knox and her husband followed all the rules as responsible parents and professionals, and have nothing to show for it but debts and an inherited brick house that is falling apart. The magazine where Willa worked has folded; the college where her husband had tenure has closed. Their dubious shelter is also the only option for a disabled father-in-law and an exasperating, free-spirited daughter. When the family’s one success story, an Ivy-educated son, is uprooted by tragedy he seems likely to join them, with dark complications of his own. In another time, a troubled husband and public servant asks, How can a man tell the truth, and be reviled for it? A science teacher with a passion for honest investigation, Thatcher Greenwood finds himself under siege: his employer forbids him to speak of the exciting work just published by Charles Darwin. His young bride and social-climbing mother-in-law bristle at the risk of scandal, and dismiss his worries that their elegant house is unsound. In a village ostensibly founded as a benevolent Utopia, Thatcher wants only to honor his duties, but his friendships with a woman scientist and a renegade newspaper editor threaten to draw him into a vendetta with the town’s powerful men. Unsheltered is the compulsively readable story of two families, in two centuries, who live at the corner of Sixth and Plum in Vineland, New Jersey, navigating what seems to be the end of the world as they know it. With history as their tantalizing canvas, these characters paint a startlingly relevant portrait of life in precarious times when the foundations of the past have failed to prepare us for the future.

Follows three generations of Indian women beset by hardships and torn by angry secrets, yet inextricably bound together by kinship.

In recent years, there has been increasing interest from geoscientists in potassic ig neous rocks. Academic geoscientists have been interested in their petrogenesis and their potential value in defining the tectonic setting of the terranes into which they were intruded, and exploration geoscientists have become increasingly interested in the association of these rocks with major epithermal gold and porphyry gold-copper deposits. Despite this current interest, there is no comprehensive textbook that deals with these aspects of potassic igneous rocks. This book redresses this situation by elucidating the characteristic features of potassic (high-K) igneous rocks, erecting a hierarchical scheme that allows interpre tation of their tectonic setting using whole-rock geochemistry, and investigating their associations with a variety of gold and copper-gold deposits, worldwide. About two thirds of the book is based on a PhD thesis by Dr Daniel Muller which was produced at the Key Centre for Strategic Mineral Deposits within the Department of Geology and Geophysics at The University of Western Australia under the supervision of Professor David Groves, the late Dr Nick Rock, Professor Eugen Stumpf!, Dr Wayne Taylor, and Dr Brendon Griffin. The remainder of the book has been compiled from the literature using the collective experience of the two authors. The book is dedi cated to the memory of Dr Rock who initiated the research project but died before its completion.

From the bestselling author of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and The BFG! Someone's been stealing from the three meanest farmers around, and they know the identity of the thief--it's Fantastic Mr. Fox! Working alone they could never catch him, but now Boggis, Bunce, and Bean have joined forces, and they've concocted a cunning plan to dig him out of his hole once and for all. What they don't know is they're not dealing with just any fox. Mr. Fox would rather die than surrender, and he just happens to have a fantastic plan of his own . . . This special edition of Roald Dahl's beloved story has a beautiful full-color interior and large trim to feature Quentin Blake's iconic art.

In The Lacuna, her first novel in nine years, Barbara Kingsolver, the acclaimed New York Times bestselling author of The Poisonwood Bible and Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life, tells the story of Harrison William Shepherd, a man caught between two worlds—an unforgettable protagonist whose search for identity will take readers to the heart of the twentieth century’s most tumultuous events.

"O felt her presence behind him like a fire at his back.” Arriving at his fourth school in six years, diplomat’s son Osei Kokote—“O” for short—knows he needs an ally if he is to survive his first day, so he is lucky to hit it off with Dee, the most popular girl in school. But one boy, used to holding sway in the world of the school­yard, can’t stand to witness the budding relationship. When Ian decides to destroy the friendship between the black boy and the golden girl, the school and its key players—teachers and pupils alike—will never be the same again. The tragedy of Othello is vividly transposed to a 1970s suburban Washington school, where kids fall in and out of love with each other before lunchtime, and practice a casual racism picked up from their parents and teachers. The world of preadolescents is as passionate and intense, if not more so, as that of adults. Drawing us into the lives and emotions of four eleven-year-olds—Osei, Dee, Ian and his reluctant girlfriend Mimi—Tracy Chevalier’s powerful drama of friends torn apart by love and jealousy, bullying and betrayal, is as moving as it is enthralling. It is an unfor­gettable novel.