Barbara Kingsolver (photo by Steven L. Hopp)
The Friends of the Washington County Public Library is sponsoring a celebration of the publication of Barbara Kingsolver’s new book, “Demon Copperhead.” The event is held Thursday, Nov. 17, at 7:30 p.m. in the ballroom of the Martha Washington Inn in Abingdon, Virginia.
At the event Kingsolver talks about her new novel and answers questions from the audience. There will also be book sales, as well as a receiving line and opportunity for photographs.
Tickets to the celebration are $25 and can be purchased on the website of the Washington County Public Library. On the library’s website, www.wcpl.net, click on “Events,” then find the ticket link under Nov. 17 on the “Calendar.” Tickets may also be purchased at the door if the event is not sold out.
Students from high schools, colleges and universities are admitted free of charge with a valid student ID. To reserve a student ticket, email Molly Schock at mschock@wcpl.net. For more information about the event, call 276-676-6233.
“Demon Copperhead” is set in Lee County, Virginia, during a period in which the coal industry is dying, tobacco farming is on the wane and there is an easy availability to narcotics. Demon, a nickname for Damon Fields, was born to a single mother in a single-wide trailer, with no assets beyond his dead father’s good looks and copper-colored hair—and a fierce will to survive.
In a fast-paced plot, Demon braves the modern perils of foster care, child labor, derelict schools, athletic success, drug addiction, disastrous loves and crushing losses. No other contemporary Appalachian novel is as dense with details of life in a contemporary Appalachian small town as “Demon Copperhead.”
The novel is an echo of Charles Dickens’s semi-autobiographical novel, “David Copperfield,” which deals with the experience of a survivor of institutional poverty in Victorian England.
Kingsolver is the author of 10 works of fiction, including “Unsheltered,” “The Poisonwood Bible,” “The Lacuna,” “Animal Dreams” and “The Bean Trees.”
Kingsolver’s work has been translated into more than 20 languages and earned literary awards and a devoted readership at home and abroad. She was awarded the National Humanities Medal the highest honor for service through the arts in the United States.
In the “Acknowledgments” at the end of the book, Kingsolver states her purpose for writing the book: “For the kids who wake up hungry in those dark places every day, who’ve lost their families to poverty and pain pills, whose caseworkers keep losing their files, who feel invisible, or wish they were: This book is for you.”
Kingsolver lives on a farm in Washington County, Virginia.
