• In hardcover The Poisonwood Bible netted nearly 400,000 copies and Prodigal Summer netted nearly 470,000 copies.

• Animal, Vegetable, Miracle was a smash bestseller, hitting lists from coast to coast, including the New York Times, Boston Globe, Denver Post, Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Wall Street Journal, Publishers Weekly, and USA Today.

• Seven years in the writing, The Lacuna has the scope and ambition and mastery of Kingsolver’s earlier masterpiece, The Poisonwood Bible. With The Lacuna, Kingsolver is writing at the peak of her powers. The novel is a richly varied narrative with surprising twists and turns; vividly evoked settings; a highly unusual and original narrative structure; brilliant insights into history, politics, and culture; and strong, idiosyncratic characters, including—for the first time in her fiction—real-life historical figures Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera, and Leon Trotsky.

The Lacuna is the story of a man’s search for safety in the grinding jaws of two nations, at a moment when the entire world seemed bent on reinventing itself at any cost.  
 

Born in the U.S., reared in a series of provisional households in Mexico, Harrison Shepherd is mostly a liability to his social-climbing flapper mother, Salomé.  From a coastal island jungle to the unpaved neighborhoods of 1930s Mexico City, through a disastrous stint at a military school in Virginia and back again, his fortunes never steady as Salomé finds her rich men-friends always on the losing side of the Mexican Revolution. Sometimes she gives her son cigarettes instead of supper.

He aims for invisibility, observing his world and recording everything with a peculiar selfless irony in his notebooks. Life is whatever he learns from servants putting him to work in the kitchen, errands he runs in the streets, and one fateful day, by mixing plaster for famed Mexican muralist Diego Rivera. Making himself useful in the household of the muralist, his wife Frida Kahlo, and exiled Bolshevik leader Lev Trotsky, young Shepherd inadvertently casts his lot with art and revolution, and the howling gossip and reportage that dictate public opinion. 

A violent upheaval sends him north to a nation newly caught up in the internationalist good will of World War II. In the mountain city of Asheville, North Carolina, he remakes himself in America’s hopeful image. Under the watch of his peerless stenographer, Violet Brown, he finds an extraordinary use for his talents of observation. But political winds continue to throw him between north and south, in a plot that turns many times on the unspeakable breach–the lacuna–between truth and public presumption. 

This is a gripping story of identity, connection with our past, and the power of words to create or devastate. Like no other novel yet written, it illuminates an era when bold internationalism gave way to a postwar landscape of narrowly defined “Americanism.”  Crossing two decades, from the vibrant revolutionary murals of Mexico City to the halls of a Congress bent on eradicating the color Red, The Lacuna is as deep and rich as the New World.