Prodigal Summer by Barbara Kingsolver

I've found it difficult to simply read one of Barbara Kingsolver's books, I would describe it as being immersed in the words. She gives such beautiful detail of the characters' surroundings, of their lives, their thoughts, their feelings.
In Prodigal Summer, set in North Carolina, we find out a lot about the ecosystem and her knowledge of science and natural history is interspersed within the story. Definitely one for my favorite reads of the year list.

From the cover:
Prodigal Summer weaves together three stories of human love within a larger tapestry of lives inhabiting the forested mountains and struggling small farms of southern Appalachia. At the heart of these intertwined narratives is a den of coyotes that have recently migrated into the region. Deanna Wolfe, a reclusive wildlife biologist, watches the forest from her outpost in an isolated mountain cabin where she is caught off-guard by Eddie Bondo, a young hunter who comes to invade her most private spaces and confound her self-assured, solitary life. On a farm several miles down the mountain, another web of lives unfolds as Lusa Maluf Landowski, a bookish city girl turned farmer's wife, finds herself unexpectedly marooned in a strange place where she must declare or lose her attachment to the land. And a few more miles down the road, a pair of elderly, feuding neighbors tend their respective farms and wrangle about God, pesticides, and the complexities of a world neither of them expected.