Barbara Kingsolver, "Partita"

You found this. Be the first one here.

Some novels arrive and reorganise the argument the country is having with itself, and the person who wrote the last one to do that is coming to Pasadena. Demon Copperhead put Appalachia and the opioid years in front of readers who had been comfortably ignoring both, won the Pulitzer, and sold in numbers that novels are not supposed to reach any more. The new book is a different swing entirely, and she will talk about it in a church hall rather than a bookstore because the bookstore cannot hold the people who want in. Worth knowing before you buy: this one is explicitly a no-signing event, so come for the talk and not for the autograph line. That is the trade Vroman's makes when the author is this big - you get a real hour of her thinking instead of ninety minutes of queue. Kingsolver in conversation is unhurried and slightly combative about politics in a way her prose only hints at. Ticketed, Wednesday evening, several hundred seats on Colorado Boulevard. The kind of night you remember having gone to.