Flight Behaviour, Barbara Kingsolver

Read on the Kindle. I chose this book because it was nominated for the Women's Prize for Fiction, along with Bring up the Bodies, Life After Life and Where'd you go, Bernadette. I'd also enjoyed The Poisonwood Bible a couple of years ago.

Dellarobia walks up the hill behind the house she shares with husband Cub.  She is going to start an affair so leaves her glasses behind.  She is confronted by a spectacle akin to a burning bush, and takes it as a sign to go back to her house, and her un-fulfilling life.  The spectacle turns out to be a phenomenon of nature - a gathering of Monarch butterflies which bring to Dellarobia's quiet mountain town all manner of outsiders.

Several themes are woven together in this book; Dellarobia's realisation of how trapped she has become, long held family secrets which come to life, and an ecological thread concerning why the butterflies have appeared in the Appalachian mountains and not their usual over-wintering habitat in Mexico.

I felt for Dellarobia, and her claustrophobic life, living in a house on her in-laws farm, and I found the gradual widening of her world to be believable.  The book is also very nicely crafted.