Flight Behavior

This is one that’s often recommended in the “best climate fiction” lists, and I can see why. 

Set in a depressed area of Appalachia, the story hinges on the arrival of a huge number of monarch butterflies, whose annual migration pattern has been disrupted, and the effect this has on the local community.

But worked into the main story are some important, closely observed messages: how climate change feels insignificant to people who are struggling to cope, how journalists and others can promote climate change denial, and how scientists need to get angry.

As with other Kingsolver novels like The… show more.

One of the first contemporary novels to take climate change seriously, and still one of the best.

The plot concerns a woman who finds millions of Monarch butterflies living in the valley near her Tennessee home, only to discover once scientists arrive that they have been driven from their native home farther south by the accelerating pace of global warming.

The novel takes a strong political stance but still manages to avoid becoming didactic, a real achievement when you consider how polarizing a subject climate change has become.

This novel is about one woman’s experience of the greatest cataclysm the world now faces: climate change. Kingsolver plunges us into the life of Dellarobia Turnbow, a bright, restless Appalachian woman married too young and trying to make sense of who she is. When migrating monarch butterflies confused by climate change unexpectedly settle on land belonging to Dellarobia’s family, they announce the advent of unmoored worlds and set Dellarobia on a new path. Barbara Kingsolver writes with such grace and empathy that I felt as if I was living Dellarobia’s hope and confusion as we pondered what is becoming of… show more.

Published in 2012, this literary novel won several awards. The author draws upon her background in biology to tell the story of a farmer Dellarobia, who hikes behind her farm in the Appalachians one day to find millions of Monarch butterflies in the valley below. The butterflies have been displaced from Mexico—some locals think it’s a message from God while scientist Ovid Byron deems it a worrying sign of climate change. Awash with biblical imagery, the novel’s central tension is between climate change deniers and scientific investigation.