Paperbacks: Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, by Barbara Kingsolver

Living off the land and writing about it isn't a radical idea, but novelist Barbara Kingsolver gives the old recipe a pleasurably folksy spin. When she and her family exchanged Tuscon, Arizona, for a farm in southern Appalachia, they decided they would only live on local or home-grown food for an entire year. Luckily her husband Steven was a fruit-growing biologist, and Kingsolver herself, having been raised in Kentucky by people who remembered the Depression, knew how to preserve a peach. Activists and foodies alike will be won over by the author's tireless labours in the barn and the pasture, and the conclusion that good food ought to cost more.