Staff Pick
This is a beautiful, timely, and compelling book that does NOT require you to reread David Copperfield to appreciate it. Just know that Kingsolver is at her best, showing us the downside of the foster care system and the destruction to young lives and communities wrought by easy access to opioids. Always a superb storyteller, Kingsolver manages to break hearts while still offering glimmers of hope. Recommended By Marianne T, Powells.com
Synopses & Reviews
WINNER OF THE 2023 PULITZER PRIZE FOR FICTION
WINNER OF THE UK'S 2023 WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION
An Oprah’s Book Club Selection
From the New York Times bestselling author of Unsheltered and Flight Behavior, a brilliant novel which enthralls, compels, and captures the heart as it evokes a young hero’s unforgettable journey to maturity.
"Demon is a voice for the ages—akin to Huck Finn or Holden Caulfield—only even more resilient. I’m crazy about this book, which parses the epidemic in a beautiful and intimate new way. I think it’s her best.”—Beth Macy, author of Dopesick
“An Appalachian David Copperfield. . . . Demon Copperhead reimagines Dickens’s story in a modern-day rural America contending with poverty and opioid addiction. . . . Like Dickens, she is unblushingly political and works on a sprawling scale...Episode by episode she persuasively conveys the mind of a teenage boy. . . . It’s hard to think of another living novelist who could take a stab at Dickens and rise above the level of catastrophe.”—New York Times
"Anyone will tell you the born of this world are marked from the get-out, win or lose."
Demon Copperhead is set in the mountains of southern Appalachia. It's the story of a boy born to a teenaged single mother in a single-wide trailer, with no assets beyond his dead father's good looks and copper-colored hair, a caustic wit, and a fierce talent for survival. 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. Through all of it, he reckons with his own invisibility in a popular culture where even the superheroes have abandoned rural people in favor of cities.
Many generations ago, Charles Dickens wrote David Copperfield from his experience as a survivor of institutional poverty and its damages to children in his society. Those problems have yet to be solved in ours. Dickens is not a prerequisite for readers of this novel, but he provided its inspiration. In transposing a Victorian epic novel to the contemporary American South, Barbara Kingsolver enlists Dickens' anger and compassion, and above all, his faith in the transformative powers of a good story. Demon Copperhead speaks for a new generation of lost boys, and all those born into beautiful, cursed places they can't imagine leaving behind.
Review
"The voice of Demon is so original. . . . Straight-talking, alert, witty and hard to deceive. In other words, a defiant retort to stereotypes about Appalachia. He’s mouthy and smart in a contemporary way, but he’s making the same call for attention and compassion Charles Dickens did more than a century and a half ago.” -USA Today
“Brilliant. . . . A page turner and Kingsolver’s best novel by far. . . . Kingsolver has some of Mark Twain in her, along with 21st-century gifts of her own. More than ever, she is our literary mirror and window. May this novel be widely read and championed.” -Minneapolis Star-Tribune
"There’s really nothing like being immersed in a Kingsolver novel. . . . Damon [is Kingsolver’s] bravest, most ambitious creation yet." -Los Angeles Times
About the Author
Barbara Kingsolver is the author of ten bestselling works of fiction, including the novels Unsheltered, Flight Behavior, The Lacuna, The Poisonwood Bible, Animal Dreams, and The Bean Trees, as well as books of poetry, essays, and creative nonfiction. Her work of narrative nonfiction is the influential bestseller Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life. Kingsolver's work has been translated into more than twenty languages and has earned literary awards and a devoted readership at home and abroad. She was awarded the National Humanities Medal, our country's highest honor for service through the arts, as well as the Dayton Literary Peace Prize for the body of her work. She lives with her family on a farm in southern Appalachia.