Demon Copperhead (B&N Exclusive Edition) (Pulitzer Prize Winner)

by Barbara Kingsolver

Overview

Notes From Your Bookseller

This stunner of a novel brings the themes of David Copperfield to the forgotten parts of rural America. Sharp and captivating, it's no surprise this won the 2023 Pulitzer Prize.

This Barnes & Noble Exclusive Edition features a special cover and an essay from Barbara Kingsolver about how a night spent at the seaside home where Charles Dickens wrote David Copperfield inspired the direction for Demon Copperhead.

“Kingsolver is a writer who can help us understand and navigate the chaos of these times.” —Minneapolis Star Tribune

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.

“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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780063282568
Publisher:	HarperCollins Publishers
Publication date:	10/18/2022
Edition description:	B&N Exclusive Edition
Pages:	560
Sales rank:	111
Product dimensions:	5.70(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.50(d)

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. 

Date of Birth:

April 8, 1955

Place of Birth:

Annapolis, Maryland

Education:

B.A., DePauw University, 1977; M.S., University of Arizona, 1981

Website:

http://www.kingsolver.com

Editorial Reviews

Absorbing….Readers see the yearning for love and wells of compassion hidden beneath Demon’s self-protective exterior…. Emotionally engaging is Demon’s fierce attachment to his home ground, a place where he is known and supported, tested to the breaking point as the opiate epidemic engulfs it…. An angry, powerful book seething with love and outrage for a community too often stereotyped or ignored.” — Kirkus Review (Starred)

From the Publisher

05/01/2022

A boy born to a single, teenage mother grows up tough in Appalachia, demonstrating a remarkable capacity for surviving foster care, child labor, and terrible schools while balancing athletic triumph with heartbreak and addiction. What matters most: his rural roots ultimately render him invisible to society. A contemporaneous David Copperfield; with a 250,000-copy first printing.

Library Journal