Author: Barbara Kingsolver
Publisher: Faber
Paperback
Published October 2022
Staff Pick! So says…
Damon Copperhead’s mom is a survivor and addict living in a trailer on her friends the Peggots’ property. His Melungeon dad, drowned in the Devil’s Bathtub, was the son of a strict man-hating Christian over in Tennessee. Yes, she’s called Betsy. Demon, as he gets nicknamed, gets thrown into foster carelessness, inspired by a teacher, pulled into opioid addiction through his love for the grief-stricken Dori, and – in a heart-stopping set piece as jittery as anything in Breaking Bad – very nearly shot during a flood. In one small Appalachian community, the cruel neglectful failures of the American corporate state play out, just as the brutalities of Victorian paternalism do in David Copperfield. Kingsolver’s novel is a furious, breathtaking work of art that takes on not only Dickens’ characters, narrative webs, and themes, but also the humanist breadth and wit of his language, made fresh for the twenty-first century, listening to how resourceful, abandoned people tell their own and each other's stories.