Barbara Kingsolver Live Virtual Event
Join BTPM and PBS Books for a live virtual event on November 5 with Barbara Kingsolver!
PBS Books welcomes Pulitzer Prize-winning author Barbara Kingsolver for an exclusive live virtual discussion about her brand-new novel Partita - a book she says she has been waiting her whole life to write. The author will take questions from the audience.
This interactive virtual book club event will take place on November 5, 2026 at 8pm.
Your $150 donation will include:
- Access to the 60-minute virtual event via StreamYard
- Recording link following the event
- Hardcover copy of Partita
- PBS Books Readers Club latte mug featuring the new "My Weekend is BOOKED" design
- BTPM membership with access to BTPM+ with PBS Passport
Barbara Kingsolver is the author of ten bestselling works of fiction, including the novels Unsheltered, The Bean Trees, and The Poisonwood Bible, as well as books of poetry, essays, creative nonfiction, and Coyote’s Wild Home, a children’s book co-authored with Lily Kingsolver. She also collaborated with family members on the influential Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life. Kingsolver’s work has been translated into more than thirty languages and has earned a devoted readership at home and abroad. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and has received numerous awards and honors including the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for her novel, Demon Copperhead, the National Humanities Medal, and most recently, the National Book Foundation's Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. She lives with her husband on a farm in southern Appalachia.
ABOUT THE BOOK
Partita, on sale October 6th, is a deeply moving novel about art, music, class, memory, and the life-altering power of love.
Livia Cable has made her peace with her marriage and modest livelihood in the farm country where she grew up, until a shocking phone call from an old lover shakes her to the core. Decades earlier, this man knew her as Livia Bohusz, a music conservatory student estranged from her home and family, uncertain of anything except her passion for music and her promise as an extraordinary pianist. His request, now, to see her again stirs up ghosts she has kept at bay for a lifetime.
Shifting between past and present, Livia’s decision to meet or reject the reunion means confronting, step by step, in memories framed as musical dances, the experiences of childhood loss, abandonment, self-immolating passion, and perilous attachment to a man who broke her belief in love and ruptured the course of her life.
With razor-sharp acuity, Kingsolver’s new novel reflects on class barriers, the risks of ambition, and the timeless, life-changing powers of art. Told in movements that mirror a Bach partita, the novel unfolds with the precision and emotional power of music itself: each section building on the last, each theme returning transformed.