Demon Copperhead
by Barbara Kingsolver
🏆 Winner of the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction
🏆 Winner of the 2023 Women’s Prize for Fiction
Recommendations from our site
“I’ve been to parts of Appalachia; I do a lot of library outreach. It’s dirt-poor. If you were transported there from New York or Atlanta, you would think you were in some sort of alternate universe, because the poverty is so extreme. The neglect, the drugs, and the opioid crisis—all of those are crimes. The kid in Demon Copperhead is in such a horrible situation that he’s taken away from his family…It’s his attitude that makes it so engaging. The book is dark, but it’s not overwhelmingly dark and horrible because he has such a great sense of humor.” Read more...
Crime Fiction and Social Justice
Karin Slaughter, Thriller and Crime Writer
“A daring reimagining of the David Copperfield story, transposed to an opioid-ravaged Appalachia, from the author of The Poisonwood Bible and Flight Behaviour. The Dickensian plot transfers remarkably well to contemporary America—worryingly so—and Kingsolver’s Demon speaks with a verve and intensity that is difficult to put down.” Read more...
The 2023 Women’s Prize for Fiction Shortlist
Cal Flyn, Journalist
“This is a real blockbuster of a novel with stunning energy, enormous humor, wit and sheer narrative drive. It’s a retelling of Dickens’s David Copperfield, from the title onwards. In fact, it follows Dickens’s plot fairly closely but Kingsolver moves the action to poor, rural Virginia, to the lives of country dwellers who in American culture have always been dismissed as hillbillies. In a way, it’s a great celebration and reclamation of that so-called hillbilly identity.
But it’s more than that because as the young hero Damon (or Demon) grows up, he becomes embroiled in one of the greatest social crises of contemporary America, which is opioid addiction. It becomes an issue-driven book, but the great disaster of mass addiction in his rural community never overwhelms his voice. It never dampens the wit and the sheer exuberance of the storytelling. In the end, it’s a book about some very, very dark social processes, but at the same time it’s still absolutely uplifting, exhilarating and enjoyable.”
