Partita: An Evening with Barbara Kingsolver
Join Pulitzer Prize-winning author Barbara Kingsolver for an evening of readings, questions, and musical performances by Jacobs School of Music pianist Susan Tsai to celebrate the release of her brand-new novel Partita.
Barbara Kingsolver is the author of ten bestselling works of fiction, including the novels Unsheltered, The Bean Trees, and The Poisonwood Bible, as well as books of poetry, essays, creative nonfiction, and Coyote’s Wild Home, a children’s book co-authored with Lily Kingsolver. She also collaborated with family members on the influential Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life. Kingsolver’s work has been translated into more than thirty languages and has earned a devoted readership at home and abroad. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and has received numerous awards and honors including the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for her novel, Demon Copperhead, the National Humanities Medal, and most recently, the National Book Foundation's Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. She lives with her husband on a farm in southern Appalachia.
Partita is a deeply moving, unforgettable novel about art, music, class, memory, and the life-altering power of love—a book she says she has been waiting her whole life to write. Livia Cable has made her peace with her marriage and modest livelihood in the farm country where she grew up, until a shocking phone call from an old lover shakes her to the core. Decades earlier, this man knew her as Livia Bohusz, a music conservatory student estranged from her home and family, uncertain of anything except her passion for music and her promise as an extraordinary pianist. His request, now, to see her again stirs up ghosts she has kept at bay for a lifetime.
Shifting between past and present, Livia’s decision to meet or reject the reunion means confronting, step by step, in memories framed as musical dances, the experiences of childhood loss, abandonment, self-immolating passion, and perilous attachment to a man who broke her belief in love and ruptured the course of her life.
With razor-sharp acuity, Kingsolver’s new novel reflects on class barriers, the risks of ambition, and the timeless, life-changing powers of art. Told in movements that mirror a Bach partita, the novel unfolds with the precision and emotional power of music itself: each section building on the last, each theme returning transformed.