Flight Behavior

Flight Behavior is a novel by Barbara Kingsolver, published in 2012. It is her seventh novel and a New York Times bestseller.

Dellarobia Turnbow is twenty-eight years old and living with her husband's family on a farm in Appalachia, with no money and no realistic prospect of anything different. Walking up the mountain to begin an affair with a telephone repairman, she finds the landscape transformed instead: a vast population of butterflies has settled on the ridge, where it has no reason to be. The phenomenon draws journalists, a researcher who wants to understand what has happened to the migration, and a village that cannot agree about what it means. Kingsolver uses the butterflies to open up arguments about class, poverty, faith, denial and climate, and Dellarobia's own life is rearranged in the process.

Kingsolver writes about rural America with close attention to the economics of ordinary households, and her central character has to work out what she believes about the world without the vocabulary of the scientists who have arrived to study it.