Barbara Kingsolver returns with 'Partita,' her first novel since 'Demon Copperhead'

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NEW YORK (AP) — For her first novel since the Pulitzer Prize-winning “Demon Copperhead," Barbara Kingsolver is taking on a subject she rarely discussed in public while growing up in a small Kentucky town: classical music.

Harper, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers, announced Thursday that “Partita” will be published Oct. 6. (Faber will release the book two days later in the UK). Like “Demon Copperhead,” “The Poisonwood Bible" and other Kingsolver novels, it's centered on a rural community. But in “Partita,” the main character is a married woman and onetime pianist haunted by a passion for music that she never lived out.

In the 1970s, Kingsolver herself was a music scholarship student at DePauw University who switched her major to biology after deciding she stood little chance of making a career out of playing classical piano. At the same time, she had ambitions to become a writer. She worked in journalism and published poetry and short fiction before completing her first novel, “The Bean Trees,” which came out in 1988.

“All my life, I’ve loved both language and music in a hungry, passionate way that happily entwines them in my brain. A novel about a classical musician never occurred to me, though, because of the sorts of people I write about," Kingsolver said in a statement. “I was the weird country kid who loved reading Tolstoy and playing Bach, but I kept those interests to myself. Finally, now, it strikes me as a worthy project to ask who made these rules, that small-town fiddlers and country music fans don’t feel welcome in a symphony hall, and vice versa?”

Kingsolver, 70, has long been known for her socially conscious fiction, often working in themes of class, community, immigration and the environment. The bestselling “Demon Copperhead” was a reworking of Charles Dickens' “David Copperfield” that Kingsolver set in modern Appalachia. Published in 2022, it was an Oprah Winfrey book club pick that shared the fiction Pulitzer with Hernan Diaz's “Trust."

Her other honors include a National Humanities Medal, a National Book Award for lifetime achievement and induction into the American Academy of Arts and Letters.