Barbara Kingsolver was born in 1955, she grew up in rural Kentucky. She has traveled widely, lived and worked in many places all over the world. She spent two decades living in Tuscon, Arizona, before moving to Virginia where she currently resides. 

 

At Frenchman Bay Library we have ten works of fiction by Barbara Kingsolver, from her first novel The Bean Trees (1988), to her most recent, Demon Copperhead (2022), which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction this year. We also have two essay collections by Kingsolver, High Tide in Tuscon and Small Wonder. All of these books are on display at the library for the month of September.

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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 a 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. The book “speaks for a new generation of lost boys, and all those born into beautiful, cursed places they can’t imagine leaving behind. “ (http://barbarakingsolver.net).

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Come and check out the library’s collection of books by this gifted an insightful writer.