Set in the present year in the rural community of Feathertown, Tennessee, Flight Behavior tells the story of Dellarobia Turnbow, a petite, razor-sharp 29-year old who nurtured worldly ambitions before becoming pregnant and marrying at seventeen. Now, after more than a decade of tending small children on a failing farm, oppressed by poverty, isolation, and her husband’s antagonistic family, she has mitigated her boredom by surrendering to an obsessive flirtation with a handsome younger man. In the opening scene she is headed for a secluded mountain cabin to meet this man and initiate what she expects will be a self-destructive affair.

The tryst never happens. Instead she walks into something on the mountainside she cannot explain or understand: a forested valley filled with silent red fire that appears to Dellarobia to be a miracle. Her discovery is both beautiful and terrible, and elicits explanation of every type: religious fundamentalists claim it as a manifestation of God; climate scientists scrutinize it as an element of disaster; politicians and environmentalists declaim its lessons; charlatans mine its opportunity; international media construct and deconstruct the story; and townspeople cope with bizarre alterations of custom.

After years lived entirely in the confines of one small house, Dellarobia finds her path suddenly opening out, chapter by chapter, into blunt and confrontational engagement with her family, her church, her town, her continent, and finally the world at large. Over the course of a single winter her life will become the property of the planet and also, possibly for the first time, securely her own.