For Kingsolver, the tree is not a symbol of life but a herald of death. The neighbors' orchard is rotting, tree roots slip their moorings in waterlogged soil, and the mountainside forest, thick with winged refugees, is in danger of being clear-cut and leaving mudslides behind. In Feathertown, Tenn., the autumn has brought rains that will not stop. Encoded from the first sentence with the language of Christianity, it's set in a rural, deep red pocket of the country, where God is presumed to work in mysterious ways and climate change is perceived as an elitist lie. Our stewardship of this warming, melting planet, with its rising seas and alarming new weather extremes, is the primary concern of Kingsolver's tale. If the mercury drops into the mid-20s, it could spell the demise of the species. Climate change has chased them north, possibly too far. Tiny creatures with flame-colored wings are encrusting the Turnbow family trees: millions of monarch butterflies, alighting to spend the winter in southern Appalachia, far from their usual Mexican migration spot.

The sight that seemed so otherworldly turns out to be very much of this realm, portending not divine benevolence but cataclysmic peril. Abandoning her exodus, she returns to her in-laws' hardscrabble sheep farm, reclaiming her place there but determined now to save her children and herself, to 'steer her family toward something better than this.' Every bough glowed with an orange blaze,' yet there is no roar of fire, no heat.įor Dellarobia, who is not religious, who knows that God has better things to do than micromanage her affairs, it is nonetheless a Moses-on-the-mountain, road-to-Damascus moment, and it tells her, albeit in less than biblical detail, how she must live.

What she perceives, when the sun emerges and the light shifts, is something of a Technicolor miracle: 'Brightness of a new intensity moved up the valley in a rippling wave, like the disturbed surface of a lake. The branches seemed to writhe.' She can't quite tell what she's looking at - partly because, out of vanity, she's left her glasses at home.

These were evergreen trees, they should be dark, and that wasn't foliage. 'Nearly all the forest she could see from here, from valley to ridge, looked altered and pale, the beige of dead leaves. En route, at an overlook, she's seized by the awareness that something is horribly, frighteningly awry.

Flight Behaviour by Barbara Kingsolver