Prodigal summer - Barbara Kingsolver

From an isolated mountain cabin, Deanna Wolfe, a reclusive wildlife biologist, watches as a den of coyotes she has studied intrude into her life in ways she never expected. Deanna, who thought she would always remain immune to the passions that have shaped other lives, now finds her own heart being tested. On a farm several miles down the mountain, Lusa Maluf Landowski, a young widow who exchanges her city life for the challenges of her husband's rural family, finds herself confronted with a unique choice: remain an outsider, or make peace with the hostile kin and their extended, often bewildering lives.

A few more miles down the road, a pair of elderly, feuding neighbors tend their respective gardens and wrangle about God, pesticides, and the possibilities of a future neither of them expected.

Over the course of one humid summer, these characters find their connections to one another and to the flora and fauna with whom they share a place. Prodigal Summer embraces and celebrates the richness of life, demonstrating a balance of narrative, drama, and breathtaking descriptions of nature's work of fiction.