While we watched without comprehension, she moved away to where none of us wanted to follow. Ruth May shrank back through the narrow passage between this brief fabric of light and all the rest of what there is for us: the long waiting. Now she will wait the rest of the time. It will be exactly as long as the time that passed before she was born.

Although the setting of the novel is somewhat similar to Kingsolver's own childhood trip to the then Republic of Congo the novel is not autobiographical. Her major non-fiction works include her 1990 publication Holding the Line: Women in the Great Arizona Mine Strike of 1983 and 2007's Animal Vegetable Miracle a description of eating locally. "


Local eating experiment
Starting in April 2005 Kingsolver and her family spent a year making every effort to eat food produced as locally as possible.

In 2000 Kingsolver establiBarbara Kingsolverd the Bellwether Prize to support "literature of social change. Kingsolver has received numerous awards including the Dayton Literary Peace Prize's Richard C. Each of her books publiBarbara Kingsolverd since 1993 has been on the New York Times Best Seller list.