Books by Barbara Kingsolver It’s been everywhere since the nineties: your neighbor’s library, your college gym, your grandmother’s coffee table, your teacher’s desk, every lake house in the Lower Forty-Eight. Kingsolver broke through to the bestseller list with his third novel, “Pigs in Paradise” (1993), but ended up camping out there for months with “The Poisonwood Bible” (1998), an epic about an American missionary family’s experiences in the revolutionary Congo. An alternative pattern followed, consisting of slightly smaller domestic novels like “The Prodigal Summer” (2000) and slightly larger historical novels like “Lacuna” (2009), until another generation was shaken by the Pulitzer Prize-winning “The Demon Copperhead” (2022), a perfect combination of the two.
If you haven’t read “Demon Copperhead” yet, what can I tell you? Grab a copy, turn off your phone, and cancel your plans for the next twenty-four hours. The novel is not just a tribute to Dickens; It’s almost a session. Damon Fields plays the role of David Copperfield in rural America so quickly that you’ll end up with paper cuts trying to turn the pages fast enough. This is Kingsolver’s elegy for Appalachia; is a call for readers to remember the generation of children orphaned and abandoned by the opioid crisis, struggling to survive and trying to make sense of an epidemic the rest of the country has long forgotten.
Kingsolver’s newest novel, “Partita,” comes out next week and is shorter and more intimate, following the pattern of expanding and contracting scales. I visited the author earlier this year for a profile in this week’s Fall Book Issue, and she described her new book as a “nesting box” of love letters told by a dairy farmer’s daughter who hoped to become a concert pianist but whose life went off the rails while at the observatory. Some of the book’s most beautiful passages are those that question the mystery of why we love what we love, whether it be a piece of music, a person, a place, or something else. Trained as a classical pianist, Kingsolver says his nineteenth book, though small, grapples with big ideas: Who does art belong to, and how can a work of art, whether a symphony or fiction, change our lives?
It’s always interesting to visit writers at their homes, and Kingsolver’s is a storied farm in Meadowview, Virginia. Readers toured the property extensively in his memoir “Animal, Vegetable, Miracle” (2007), which documented his family’s attempt to subsist almost entirely on what they or their neighbors could grow in southwestern Virginia. Kingsolver offers advice on growing tomatoes and pickling cucumbers, as well as a humorous riff on turkey sex and a prescient discussion of technology in Amish society. I didn’t have room in the Profile for one of my favorite features of Kingsolver’s home: the stack of books he keeps like a to-do list next to the standing desk in his office: read, shelve, find another home, revisit. Below are a few books written by living authors Kingsolver loves to consider for your own pile.