09/25/2026
PARTITA by Barbara Kingsolver comes out October 6, 2026.
“After Dr. Wendell died, in the spring of 2024, Kingsolver finally felt free to write about her origins. “I needed both my parents to be gone before I could write this,” [Kingsolver] says of “Partita.” Its narrator, Livia Bohusz, is a small-town girl from Tennessee who learns to play piano at church, practicing endless hours for one recital after another, culminating in a guest appearance with the Knoxville Symphony Orchestra and then a scholarship to the Indiana University School of Music. Her ambitions are fuelled not only by a desire to perfect her talents but by desperation to escape her family: a brother whose su***de torments those who survived him; a mother who terrorizes her, emotionally and physically, for everything, including her musical gifts; a “Cross-to-Bear Methodist” father who is too cowed to protect his daughter or publicly champion her talents. “A child can’t hate her mother without putting the load-bearing walls of the known world at risk,” Livia confides in one early chapter. “I settled for hating her shoes.””
One of the country’s most popular novelists writes what she calls socially engaged fiction. In Barbara Kingsolver’s new book, she considers the role of art—and who it’s for.
