The Bean Trees

The Bean Trees is the first novel of the American writer Barbara Kingsolver, published in 1988 and reissued ten years later with a sequel, Pigs in Heaven.

Marietta Greer, who renames herself Taylor, grows up poor in Kentucky and leaves as soon as she can, which is the beginning of a journey that has no destination until her car fails in Arizona. The child she is given in Oklahoma has been through something she cannot describe, and Taylor works out how to look after her while learning the town. She finds friends who become the structure of the book: Lou Ann, whose husband has left her with a small son, and Mattie, who runs a tyre shop and quietly helps refugees who have crossed the southern border. Through Mattie, Taylor meets Estevan and Esperanza, a Guatemalan couple seeking asylum in the United States, and the novel puts Taylor's own small story about starting over alongside people who have lost far more than she has.

Kingsolver writes about ordinary working life with the details of the place in it, and the book is concerned with what people owe each other when they have no legal or family claim on each other at all.