What it shares with these books is an integration of important issues with engaging narrative that feels organic: A colony of butterflies and a young woman have both deviated from their optimal flight paths, a story Kingsolver uses to take on global warming and the high costs to society of grossly inadequate public school education, especially in the sciences.īut, as readers of The Poisonwood Bible and The Lacuna are well aware, Kingsolver is no mere propagandist. While Kingsolver's seventh novel, Flight Behavior, does not quite achieve the resonance of Morrison's and Doctorow's masterpieces, this is partly due to its inherently less dramatic material. Doctorow on the collateral damage of war in The March.

But done well, it can be both eye-opening and moving: think Charles Dickens on children and poverty in Oliver Twist Upton Sinclair on the meat-processing industry in The Jungle Toni Morrison on the tolls of slavery in Beloved E.L. In the wrong hands, fiction written to convey urgent social messages is as tedious as a political harangue. How?īarbara Kingsolver's commitment to literature promoting social justice runs so deep that in 1998 she established the Bellwether Prize (now the PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction) to encourage it. Your purchase helps support NPR programming.

When she fell in love with writing it helped her to engage differently with the world, and she has gone on to be nominated for the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction, the Wasafiri New Writing Prize and the BBC National Short Story Award.Close overlay Buy Featured Book Title Flight Behavior Author Barbara Kingsolver Jacqueline Crooks grew up in Southall, part of London’s migrant community, and was immersed in the gang underworld as a young woman. Jacqueline Crooks has smashed it out of the park with her debut novel Fire Rush, earning herself a spot on the 2023 shortlist.įire Rush explores Black womanhood in an underground club on London’s outskirts as she meets a man, Moose, with whom she falls head over heels for.īut their relationship doesn’t last forever and the novel is a telling of passion, anger and transformation.

Why not pop all the books in your basket and judge the winner for yourself? Fire Rush by Jacqueline Crooks Those that made the cut in 2023 are predominantly British: four of the list are from the UK, alongside one American and one Irish writer.

Flight Behaviour by Barbara Kingsolver