Barbara Kingsolver – författare

"Romanen sjuder av ömhet och hjärtskärande sorg" Göteborgs-Posten

Demon Copperhead kommer till världen på ett badrumsgolv i en husvagn. Hans artonåriga mamma ligger utslagen av droger och är knappt vid medvetande. Så börjar Demon sitt liv, redan på förhand dömd till en tillvaro kantad av fosterhemsplaceringar, utsatthet och missbruk.

I Lee County, Virginia, i Appalachernas sydliga delar växer Demon upp. Här är fattigdomen lika självklar som luften man andas och här marknadsför läkemedelsindustrin skoningslöst sina opioider mot de redan utsatta. Missbruket växer till en epidemi som slår hårt mot hela samhället.

Utan några andra tillgångar än sitt kopparfärgade hår, sin krassa humor och sin starka överlevnadsinstinkt, tar sig Demon Copperhead igenom barndomen och ungdomsåren. Han bärs av drömmen som hållit honom uppe ända sedan han var liten: att en dag få se havet. Frågan är vad som krävs för att den ska bli sann.

Demon Copperhead är en storslagen och drabbande roman om kärlek, förlust och allt däremellan. Den är också en skoningslös blick på det samhälle som än i dag tillåter de allra svagaste att gå under.

Vinnare av Pulitzerpriset 2023

"måste-läsning om att vara människa som berör på djupet och bär på både hopp och medmänsklighet." M-Magasin

"underhållande, berörande och fartfyllt" Tidningen Vi

"Varje sida är ett litet mästerverk i sig" Lerums Tidning

”en bladvändare” Borås Tidning

”både lika spännande som genuint relevant” ETC

”en läsfest” BTJ

WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE - WINNER OF THE WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION

New York Times Readers' Pick: Top 100 Books of the 21st Century - An Oprah's Book Club Selection - An Instant New York Times Bestseller - An Instant Wall Street Journal Bestseller - A #1 Washington Post Bestseller - A New York Times "Ten Best Books of the Year"

"Demon is a voice for the ages--akin to Huck Finn or Holden Caulfield--only even more resilient." --Beth Macy, author of Dopesick

"May be the best novel of [the year]. . . . Equal parts hilarious and heartbreaking, this is the story of an irrepressible boy nobody wants, but readers will love." --Ron Charles, Washington Post

From the acclaimed author of The Poisonwood Bible and The Bean Trees, a brilliant novel that enthralls, compels, and captures the heart as it evokes a young hero's unforgettable journey to maturity

Set in the mountains of southern Appalachia, Demon Copperhead is 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. Relayed in his own unsparing voice, Demon 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.

Året är 1959. Den amerikanske baptistpastorn Nathan Price – karg, självgod och gudfruktig – går i spetsen när han med sin hustru och deras fyra döttrar ger sig iväg ut i den afrikanska obygden för att sprida Guds ord till infödingarna i Belgiska Kongo. Kongo står på tröskeln till självständighet och landet sjuder av politisk oro. Snart ska Patrice Lumumba väljas till det fria Kongos förste president. Inbördeskrig hotar.

I Giftträdets bibel berättar kvinnorna – hustrun och de fyra döttrarna – om en missionärstillvaro som tar en olycksbådande vändning. Den patriarkaliske fadern, orubblig i sin religiösa övertygelse, utvecklas till en hänsynslös tyrann pch familjen går mot sin upplösning och undergång ...

Giftträdets bibel gavs ut för första gången 1998 och blev Barbara Kingsolvers genombrottsroman.

"Romanen sjuder av ömhet och hjärtskärande sorg" Göteborgs-Posten

"En måste-läsning om att vara människa som berör på djupet och bär på både hopp och medmänsklighet." M-Magasin

Demon Copperhead kommer till världen på ett badrumsgolv i en husvagn. Hans artonåriga mamma ligger utslagen av droger och är knappt vid medvetande. Så börjar Demon sitt liv, redan på förhand dömd till en tillvaro kantad av fosterhemsplaceringar, utsatthet och missbruk.

I Lee County, Virginia, i Appalachernas sydliga delar växer Demon upp. Här är fattigdomen lika självklar som luften man andas och här marknadsför läkemedelsindustrin skoningslöst sina opioider mot de redan utsatta. Missbruket växer till en epidemi som slår hårt mot hela samhället.

Utan några andra tillgångar än sitt kopparfärgade hår, sin krassa humor och sin starka överlevnadsinstinkt, tar sig Demon Copperhead igenom barndomen och ungdomsåren. Han bärs av drömmen som hållit honom uppe ända sedan han var liten: att en dag få se havet. Frågan är vad som krävs för att den ska bli sann.

Demon Copperhead är en storslagen och drabbande roman om kärlek, förlust och allt däremellan. Den är också en skoningslös blick på det samhälle som än i dag tillåter de allra svagaste att gå under.

Vinnare av Pulitzerpriset 2023

Vinnare av Women's Prize for Fiction 2023

Vinnare av James Tait Black Prize 2023

New York Times Bestseller • Pulitzer Prize Finalist • An Oprah's Book Club Selection

“Powerful . . . [Kingsolver] has with infinitely steady hands worked the prickly threads of religion, politics, race, sin and redemption into a thing of terrible beauty.” —Los Angeles Times Book Review

The Poisonwood Bible, now celebrating its 25th anniversary, established Barbara Kingsolver as one of the most thoughtful and daring of modern writers. Taking its place alongside the classic works of postcolonial literature, it is a suspenseful epic of one family's tragic undoing and remarkable reconstruction over the course of three decades in Africa.

The story is told by the wife and four daughters of Nathan Price, a fierce, evangelical Baptist who takes his family and mission to the Belgian Congo in 1959. They carry with them everything they believe they will need from home, but soon find that all of it—from garden seeds to Scripture—is calamitously transformed on African soil.

The novel is set against one of the most dramatic political chronicles of the twentieth century: the Congo's fight for independence from Belgium, the murder of its first elected prime minister, the CIA coup to install his replacement, and the insidious progress of a world economic order that robs the fledgling African nation of its autonomy. Against this backdrop, Orleanna Price reconstructs the story of her evangelist husband's part in the Western assault on Africa, a tale indelibly darkened by her own losses and unanswerable questions about her own culpability. Also narrating the story, by turns, are her four daughters—the teenaged Rachel; adolescent twins Leah and Adah; and Ruth May, a prescient five-year-old. These sharply observant girls, who arrive in the Congo with racial preconceptions forged in 1950s Georgia, will be marked in surprisingly different ways by their father's intractable mission, and by Africa itself. Ultimately each must strike her own separate path to salvation. Their passionately intertwined stories become a compelling exploration of moral risk and personal responsibility.

""Clever. . . magical. . . beautifully crafted. Kingsolver spins you around the philosophic world a dozen times.""—Milwaukee Sentinel

""Kingsolver''s essays should be savored like quiet afternoons with a friend."" —New York Times Book Review

In this brilliant essay collection, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Barbara Kingsolver turns to her favored literary terrain to explore themes of family, community, and the natural world.

With the eyes of a scientist and the vision of a poet, Kingsolver writes about notions as diverse as modern motherhood, the history of private property, and the suspended citizenship of humans in the animal kingdom. Kingsolver''s canny pursuit of meaning from an inscrutable world compels us to find instructions for life in surprising places: a museum of atomic bomb relics, a West African voodoo love charm, an iconographic family of paper dolls, the ethics of a wild pig who persistently invades a garden, a battle of wills with a two-year-old, or a troop of oysters who observe high tide in the middle of Illinois.

In sharing her thoughts about the urgent business of being alive, Kingsolver the essayist employs the same keen eyes, persuasive tongue, and understanding heart that characterize her acclaimed fiction. In High Tide in Tucson, Kingsolver is defiant, funny, and courageously honest.

""A novel full of miracles.”—Newsweek

“Breathtaking. . . unforgettable. . . . This profound, funny, bighearted novel, in which people actually find love and kinship in surprising places, is also heavenly. . . . A rare feat and a triumph.” —Cosmopolitan

Picking up where her modern classic The Bean Trees left off, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Barbara Kingsolver’s Pigs in Heaven continues the tale of Turtle and Taylor Greer, a Native American girl and her adoptive mother who have settled in Tucson, Arizona, as they both try to overcome their difficult pasts.

When six-year-old Turtle Greer witnesses a freak accident at the Hoover Dam, her insistence on what she has seen and her mother''s belief in her lead to a man''s dramatic rescue. But Turtle''s moment of celebrity draws her into a conflict of historic proportions. The crisis quickly envelops not only Turtle and her mother, Taylor, but everyone else who touches their lives in a complex web connecting their future with their past.

Pigs in Heaven travels the roads from rural Kentucky and the urban Southwest to Heaven, Oklahoma, and the Cherokee Nation as it draws the reader into a world of heartbreak and redeeming love, testing the boundaries of family and the many separate truths about the ties that bind.

In twenty-two wonderfully articulate essays, Barbara Kingsolver raises her voice in praise of nature, family, literature, and the joys of everyday life while examining the genesis of war, violence, and poverty in our world

From the author of High Tide in Tucson, comes Small Wonder, a new collection of essays that begins with a parable gleaned from recent news: villagers search for a missing infant boy and find him, unharmed, in the cave of a dangerous bear that has mothered him like one of her own. Clearly, our understanding of evil needs to be revised. What we fear most can save us. From this tale, Barbara Kingsolver goes on to consider the chasm between the privileged and the poor, which she sees as the root cause of violence and war in our time. She writes about her attachment to the land, to nature and wilderness, trees and mountains--the place from which she tells her stories. Whether worrying about the dangers of genetically engineered food crops, or creating opportunities for children to feel useful and competent--like growing food for the family’s table--Kingsolver looks for small wonders, where they grow, and celebrates them.

Cover illustration © Panteek

New York Times bestselling author Barbara Kingsolver delivers a collection of 12 original tales in Homeland and Other Stories that are every bit as emotionally resonant, humorous, and heartfelt as her much-beloved novels.

In settings ranging from eastern Kentucky to northern California and the Caribbean island of St. Lucia, Barbara Kingsolver uses her distinctive voice and vast knowledge of human nature to address some of her favorite themes: the importance of personal and cultural heritage; how the past effects the present and the enduring power of love. Kingsolver’s characters, many single mothers, struggle to make sense of their lives and find meaning in a difficult world.

Praised for her memorable characters and poetic prose, Kingsolver again proves why she is a literary force to be reckoned with.

This edition includes a P.S. section with additional insights from the author, background material, suggestions for further reading, and more.

National Bestseller

“A blend of breathtaking artistry, encyclopedic knowledge of the natural world. . . and ardent commitment to the supremacy of nature.”—San Francisco Chronicle

In this beautiful novel, Barbara Kingsolver, acclaimed author of The Poisonwood Bible and the Pulitzer-Prize winning Demon Copperhead, weaves together three stories of human love within a larger tapestry of lives inhabiting the forested mountains and struggling small farms of southern Appalachia.

Over the course of one humid summer, as the urge to procreate overtakes the lush countryside, this novel''s intriguing protagonists—a reclusive wildlife biologist, a young farmer''s wife marooned far from home, and a pair of elderly, feuding neighbors—face disparate predicaments but find connections to one another and to the flora and fauna with whom they necessarily share a place. Their discoveries are embedded inside countless intimate lessons of biology, the realities of small farming, and the final, urgent truth that humans are only one piece of life on earth.

Prodigal Summer is a hymn to wildness that celebrates the prodigal spirit of human nature, and of nature itself.

“A profound, graceful, and literary work of philosophy and economics, well tempered for our times, and yet timeless. . . . It will change the way you look at the food you put into your body. Which is to say, it can change who you are.”—Boston Globe

Barbara Kingsolver''s New York Times bestselling book describing her family''s adventure as they move to a farm in southern Appalachia and realign their lives with the local food chain

Hang on for the ride: With characteristic poetry and pluck, Kingsolver and her family sweep readers along on their journey away from the industrial-food pipeline to a rural life in which they vow to buy only food raised in their own neighborhood, grow it themselves, or learn to live without it. Their good-humored search yields surprising discoveries about turkey sex life and overly zealous zucchini plants, en route to a food culture that’s better for the neighborhood and also better on the table. Part memoir, part journalistic investigation, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle makes a passionate case for putting the kitchen back at the center of family life and diversified farms at the center of the American diet. It''s a modern classic that will endure for years to come.