Pigs in heaven

Pigs in Heaven is a novel by the American writer Barbara Kingsolver, published in 1993. It continues the story of Taylor Greer and her adopted daughter Turtle.

Taylor was handed the child at a petrol station in the earlier novel The Bean Trees and has raised her ever since, with the help of the people she has collected around her. The trouble in this book arrives through the news: a lawyer sees Turtle on television and begins to ask whether a white woman in Arizona should be the mother of a Cherokee girl, and the case becomes a question about who has the right to decide. Taylor goes to Oklahoma with her daughter, and the novel spends much of its time there, among the extended family, the tribal offices and the history of the Cherokee Nation, including the removals and the land they were moved to. Kingsolver keeps the book warm and comic while the custody argument runs underneath it, and neither side of the argument is presented as simply wrong.

The novel followed the author's first book and took its characters further into the country her later fiction kept returning to.