FOPOS Book Club: Prodigal Summer // 5.30.25

Join Friends of Princeton Open Space (FOPOS) at the Mountain Lakes House for a book club dedicated to readings about conservation, stewardship, and our relationship with nature.

Led by Diana Newby, FOPOS volunteer and faculty member in Princeton University's Writing Program, we'll spend our time together discussing Barbara Kingsolver's novel Prodigal Summer. An award-winning fiction writer with degrees in biology and ecology, Kingsolver is known for novels that expansively explore human connections to the environment. A vibrant and richly drawn portrait of a single season in small-town Appalachia, Prodigal Summer works to erode the distinctions that might seem to divide people and animals, culture and wilderness, mind and body, self and other. As Kingsolver's readers, we will take up her invitation to consider how our own lives, like the lives of her characters, are intimately, messily entangled with both our human and our nonhuman neighbors.

We will spend our first hour discussing the book, sharing impressions, reflections, and points of connection to the mission of FOPOS as well as our personal relationships with nature. In the last half hour, we will embody the environmental immersiveness of Prodigal Summer by taking a nature walk guided by FOPOS volunteers.

About FOPOS: Founded in 1969, Friends of Princeton Open Space is a nonprofit organization dedicated to acquiring open space in Princeton for preservation, protecting natural resources, maintaining accessibility to trails, and providing environmental education. As part of our mission, we work with groups in the Princeton region to support efforts to preserve and protect open space and the environment. Since our founding, we’ve helped raise over $7 million to purchase land and conservation easements in Princeton.

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