That same year, she established the Pen/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction and won the National Humanities Medal for her contribution of service through the arts. She is no stranger to the Oprah’s Book Club family: Her novel The Poisonwood Bible, about a missionary family in the Congo, was chosen as an OBC pick in 2000. Raised in Kentucky with a brief stint in the Congo, Kingsolver is known for stories that center on the Appalachians, where she lives on a farm. They are also what grips the reader from the very first pages, and keeps you thinking about this remarkable protagonist long after you’ve reached the end. The tale is narrated in the first person retrospective by an older and wiser narrator who shows us that despite Demon’s circumstances, his wit, grit, and other talents, are his lifeline.

Despite most of the odds being stacked against him, including a sense that he never quite belongs, it’s his innate resilience that ultimately keeps him afloat. The redheaded boy was born a fighter but becomes increasingly unmoored as the years pass and his mother’s addiction deepens. From Lee County, Virginia, to Union County, Tennessee, Demon looks back on his depressed childhood, including the poverty and desperation of his circumstances. Inspired by Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield, which was published in 1850 amid the poverty of Victorian England, Kingsolver’s Demon is set in Virginia at the beginning of the opioid epidemic in the 1990s. An iconic first line “First, I got myself born,” begins the tale of Damon Fields, aka Demon Copperhead, born in a trailer to a single mother in the mountains of Appalachia.

Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver