Finalists for the 1992-1993 Los Angeles Times Book Prizes : FICTION

PIGS IN HEAVEN by Barbara Kingsolver (HarperCollins). “How can you belong to a tribe and be your own person at the same time?” a character asks in Kingsolver’s lyrical, comic and wise story of disconnection and coming together. The gifted storyteller returns to the characters and settings of her first novel, “The Bean Trees,” in which single motherhood was thrust upon Taylor Greer by the abandonment of a Cherokee girl into her care. Since then, fierce love has set in between Taylor and daughter, Turtle, so named for her tenacious grip on her mother as insurance against further abandonment. A freak accident at Hoover Dam initiates a chain of events that bring Taylor’s adoption of Turtle to the attention of a zealous, young Cherokee Nation lawyer, Annawake Fourkiller, whose ambition is not yet tempered by wisdom. When Taylor is faced with the loss of Turtle, they go on the lam. Poverty ensues and so does the realization that disconnecting from family ties “doesn’t give you anything to fall back on.” Yet Taylor resists the easy way out, having realized, that it is herself she can count on. “If I bail out here, I won’t even have that.”

The Los Angeles Times Book Prize finalists and winners are selected in each category by an independent panel of judges. Winners will be announced in the Book Review issue of October 31.