As the title suggests, it’s a backwoods twist on Dickens’ David Copperfield, starting from the opening sentence, “First, I got myself born.” Demon, né Damon, is a chatty, likeable orphan whose life gets caught up in the structural poverty and opioid epidemic that plagues rural America. Kingsolver’s new novel, Demon Copperhead, takes her back to Appalachia, where the author was raised and where, after decades away, she once again lives, on a farm in southwestern Virginia. It’s easy to dismiss her novels as middlebrow, but I’ve found the best of her work angry, engaged with politics, and alive to the natural world in ways that have only felt more relevant as tastes in fiction have evolved.

I could barely hold it together when she described my own book to me on the phone-her appreciation of the craft, the empathy, and how it touched her personally.Barbara Kingsolver has been writing about issues of social justice for decades, starting with her first novel, 1988’s The Bean Trees, set against the backdrop of immigrant life in Arizona. 'Not just because of the powerful way she connects books and readers, but because of the reader she is herself. Here’s what Kingsolver had to say upon finding out Demon Copperhead had been chosen for Oprah’s Book Club: “Getting that call from Oprah is the highest literary prize on the planet, if you ask me,” she said. Through all of it, he reckons with his own invisibility in a culture that’s been largely abandoned. In a plot that never pauses for breath, relayed in his own unsparing voice, he braves the modern perils of foster care, child labor, derelict schools, athletic success, addiction, disastrous loves, and crushing losses.

As Kingsolver recently told The New York Times, this produced “a generation of kids who’ve had their lives torn apart.”ĭemon Copperhead spins the tale of a boy born to a teenaged mother in a single-wide trailer, with no assets beyond his dead father’s good looks and red hair, a caustic wit, and a fierce talent for survival.

It’s Kingsolver’s 17th novel in some three decades, and in writing it, she says she wanted to counter some of the condescension and downright snobbery directed at the region in which she was born and still lives, an area whose people, she believes, have been exploited for generations, most recently by pharmaceutical companies who targeted Appalachian residents and created the current opioid crisis. Kingsolver conceived the idea while on a visit to Dickens’s historic seaside English retreat and actually started writing Demon Copperhead at Dickens’s own desk. Demon Copperhead re-envisions the Charles Dickens classic David Copperfield, setting it in modern-day Appalachia.

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