The events of a December afternoon on which a father and his daughter find an abandoned infant in the snow will forever alter 11-year-old Nicky Dillon's understanding of the world which she is about to enter and the adults who inhabit it.

One night in 1917, Beatrice Haven creeps out of her uncle's house on Cape Ann, Massachusetts, and leaves her newborn baby at the foot of a pear tree, then watches as another woman claims the child as her own. The unwed daughter of wealthy Jewish industrialists and a gifted pianist bound for Radcliffe, Bea plans to leave her shameful secret behind and make a fresh start... Ten years later, Bea's hopes for her future remain unfulfilled. When she returns...

The abduction of five-year-old Matthew Faraday provokes national outcry and a desperate police hunt. And when his face is splashed over the newspapers, psychotherapist Frieda Klein is left troubled: one of her patients has been relating dreams in which he has a hunger for a child. The child he describes is the spitting image of Matthew.

Dickens' story of Pip's progress from rags to riches deals with the pervasive themes of greed, desire, money and the nature of capitalism.

The Bean Trees is a classic novel of a young woman's voyage of discovery across the Midwest. Barbara Kingsolver is also the author of Animal Dreams, Pigs in Heaven, The Poisonwood Bible, and Homeland, a short story collection.