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If You Like Barbara Kingsolver, You Might Enjoy . . .

BOOK BUZZ: Ever since the publication of The Bean Trees, her first novel, Barbara Kingsolver has been known as both a popular and literary author. The Poisonwood Bible, about an American family's cultural arrogance in Africa, was chosen for Oprah's Book Club in 2000. Her latest work of fiction, The Lacuna, mixes art and politics in an historical novel set in Mexico and the United States. Animal, Vegetable, Miracle : A Year of Food Life is her personal story of moving her family from Arizona to rural Appalachia, challenging themselves to a sustainable diet.

Here are some read-alike suggestions for novels and nonfiction similar to Barbara Kingsolver's. Check out our blogs and Staff Picks lists for more book, music and movie recommendations.

Abu-Jaber, Diana: Crescent

2003

When a handsome professor of Arabic literature and Iraqi exile enters her life, single, 39-year-old Sirine finds herself falling in love and, in the process, starts questioning her identity as an Arab-American.
Atwood, Margaret: The Blind Assassin

2001

Containing a novel within a novel, The Blind Assassin is a science fiction story told by two unnamed lovers who meet in dingy backstreet rooms. Told in a style that captures the colloquialisms of the 1930s and 1940s, it unfolds layer by astonishing layer and concludes in a brilliant and wonderfully satisfying twist.
Dillard, Annie: The Maytrees

2007

In this powerfully moving novel, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Dillard displays penetrating insight into the human condition with a remarkable story about the unknowable, unbreakable bonds of love and family.
Erdrich, Louise: The Plague of Doves

2008

In this "multigenerational tour-de-force of sin, redemption, murder and vengeance" (Publishers Weekly), a senseless and horrific crime in 1911 forever changes the lives of several families living in and around Pluto, North Dakota, a white town on the far western edge of an Ojibwe reservation.
Foer, Jonathan Safran: Eating Animals

641.303 F654e 2009

Faced with the prospect of being unable to explain to his children why people eat some animals and not others, Foer set out to explore the origins of many eating traditions and the fictions involved with creating them.
Kilmer-Purcell, Josh: The Bucolic Plague: How Two Manhattanites Became Gentlemen Farmers: An Unconventional Memoir

B-Ki55b 2010

Tart and sweet, touching and laugh-out-loud funny, The Bucolic Plague shows what happens when two middle-aged New Yorkers (one, an ex-drag queen) do the unthinkable: start over, have a herd of kids (the four-legged kind) and get a little dirty.
Matthiessen, Peter: At Play in the Fields of the Lord

1965

Set in a malarial outpost of the South American jungle, Matthiessen's electrifying moral thriller follows the clash between two misplaced gringos: Martin Quarrier, who has come to convert the local Indians to Christianity, and Lewis Moon, a half-Indian mercenary who has been hired to kill them. "Extraordinary . . . beautifully written". New York Times.
McCarthy, Cormac: Blood Meridian, or, The Evening Redness in the West

1985

An epic novel of the violence and depravity that attended America's westward expansion, Blood Meridian brilliantly subverts the conventions of the Western novel and the mythology of the "wild West." Based on historical events that took place on the Texas-Mexico border in the 1850s, it traces the fortunes of the Kid, a 14-year-old Tennesseean who stumbles into the nightmarish world where Indians are being murdered and the market for their scalps is thriving.
Patchett, Ann: Run

2007

Set over a period of 24 hours, Run shows how worlds of privilege and poverty can coexist only blocks apart from each other, and how family can include the most unlikely of people, in this novel about secrets, duty, responsibility and the lengths people will go to protect their children.
Smith, Alisa and J.B. MacKinnon: Plenty: One Man, One Woman, and a Raucous Year of Eating Locally

641.563 S642p 2007

Plenty tells the remarkable adventures of a Canadian couple who make a year-long attempt to eat foods grown and produced within a 100-mile radius of their apartment — and learn the simple joys of reconnecting with community and home ground in the process.
Strout, Elizabeth: Olive Kitteridge

2008

New York Times best-selling author Strout binds together 13 rich, luminous narratives through the presence of one larger-than-life, unforgettable character: Olive Kitteridge, who offers profound insights into the human condition.