Reading order
| # | Title | Published | Author | Buy on Amazon |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | High Tide in Tucson: Essays from Now or Never | 1995 | Barbara Kingsolver | Buy |
| 2 | Holding the Line: Women in the Great Arizona Mine Strike of 1983 | 1996 | Barbara Kingsolver | Buy |
| 3 | Small Wonder: Essays | 2002 | Barbara Kingsolver | Buy |
| 4 | Last Stand: America’s Virgin Lands | 2002 | Barbara Kingsolver | Buy |
| 5 | Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: Our Year of Season Eating | 2007 | Barbara Kingsolver | Buy |
Barbara Kingsolver’s non-fiction covers environmental issues, labor history, and personal essays. High Tide in Tucson (1995) collects essays on life and nature. Holding the Line (1996) documents the 1983 Arizona mine strike. Animal, Vegetable, Miracle (2007), her most popular non-fiction book, chronicles her family’s year of growing and eating locally.
Small Wonder (2002) was written in the months after September 11, 2001, and gathers essays about finding hope during difficult times. Last Stand: America’s Virgin Lands (2002), a collaboration with photographer Annie Griffiths, documents the country’s remaining wild places through text and images. These two books show Kingsolver responding to the specific moment she was writing in.
Animal, Vegetable, Miracle became a touchstone for the local food movement when it was published. The book follows Kingsolver’s family on their farm in southern Virginia as they commit to eating only what they can grow or source locally for a full year. Her non-fiction, like her novels, keeps returning to questions about how people live on the land and what they owe the natural world.