Author Guide · Literary Fiction & Nature Writing
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Kingsolver writes fiction rooted in place — the Congo, the Appalachian mountains, the American Southwest — and in the political and ecological forces that shape ordinary lives within them. She is the only novelist to have won the Women's Prize for Fiction twice, for The Lacuna in 2010 and Demon Copperhead in 2023, and Demon Copperhead also took the Pulitzer. This page has all nine novels in the order they were published, plus Partita, her tenth, out in October 2026.
By Lisanne Swart · 9 novels · 1 forthcoming · Female authors · Pulitzer Prize 2023 · Updated September 2026
Quick answer
Barbara Kingsolver has published nine novels, from The Bean Trees (1988) to Demon Copperhead (2022). Her tenth, Partita, is out 6 October 2026 in the United States and 8 October in the United Kingdom. You will also see the figure eleven, including from her own publisher: that count folds in Homeland and Other Stories (1989), which is short fiction, and How to Fly (2020), which is poetry. If you have never read her, start with Demon Copperhead; if you want the novel that made her reputation, The Poisonwood Bible.
Watch: Oprah in Conversation with Barbara Kingsolver
Quick facts about Barbara Kingsolver
- Born
- 8 April 1955, Annapolis, Maryland; raised in Carlisle, Kentucky
- Novels published
- Nine, 1988 to 2022
- Next novel
- Partita — 6 October 2026 (Harper, US), 8 October (Faber, UK)
- Lives
- On a farm in south-western Virginia, since 2004
- Women's Prize
- Won twice — The Lacuna (2010) and Demon Copperhead (2023); the only novelist to do so
- Pulitzer Prize
- Fiction, 2023, for Demon Copperhead, shared with Hernan Diaz's Trust
- Lifetime award
- National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, 20 November 2024
- The Congo
- Spent about a year there aged seven, in 1963, while her father worked as a doctor
All 10 books by Barbara Kingsolver, in order
The Bean Trees
A young woman leaves rural Kentucky in a worn-out Volkswagen, is handed an abandoned Cherokee toddler at a roadside bar in Oklahoma, and builds an unlikely household in Tucson. Kingsolver's debut, written largely at night during a difficult pregnancy, and the book that set out the themes she has worked on ever since: displacement, chosen family, and politics arriving through the back door of a personal story.
Animal Dreams
Codi Noline returns to the Arizona town she grew up in to look after her father, who is losing his memory, and finds herself drawn into a fight over a river poisoned by a mining company. Told in alternating voices between Codi and her father, with her sister writing home from Nicaragua. It won the PEN/USA West Fiction Award and an Edward Abbey Ecofiction Award.
Pigs in Heaven
The sequel to The Bean Trees, and the novel that takes the first book's happy ending apart. A Cherokee lawyer challenges the adoption at the centre of that story under the Indian Child Welfare Act, and Kingsolver refuses to make either side the villain. Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction.
The Poisonwood Bible
A Baptist missionary takes his wife and four daughters to the Belgian Congo in 1959, on the eve of independence and the CIA-backed coup that followed. The family's unravelling is told in five alternating female voices, none of them his. A Pulitzer Prize finalist and the novel that moved Kingsolver from a well-reviewed writer to a major one. She drew on the year her own family spent in the Congo when she was seven, though the book is researched fiction rather than memoir.
→ More books by female authorsProdigal Summer
Three loosely linked stories over one humid summer in southern Appalachia: a wildlife biologist living alone on a mountain, a young widow trying to hold a farm together, and two elderly neighbours conducting a decades-long argument about pesticides. The most explicitly ecological of her novels, and the one where the landscape does the most of the work.
The Lacuna
Harrison Shepherd, born to an American father and a Mexican mother, ends up cooking in the household of Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo, typing for Trotsky in exile, and finally in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee. Her most formally ambitious book, assembled from journals, letters and newspaper clippings. It won the Orange Prize — now the Women's Prize for Fiction — in 2010, the first of her two.
Flight Behavior
A Tennessee farm woman climbs the mountain behind her house intending to begin an affair and finds the trees full of monarch butterflies, millions of them, wintering a continent away from where they should be. Scientists and news crews follow. Kingsolver, who trained as a biologist, uses the spectacle to write about class, faith and what it takes for someone to change their mind about the climate.
Unsheltered
Two families in the same collapsing New Jersey house, a century and a half apart: a magazine editor watching her career and her roof give way in the present, and a science teacher defending Darwin to a hostile town in the 1870s. The chapters alternate and each one ends on the phrase the next begins with.
Demon Copperhead
Dickens's David Copperfield moved to present-day Lee County, Virginia, and narrated by a boy born on the floor of a single-wide to a teenage mother, who passes through foster care, tobacco farms, high-school football and OxyContin. Kingsolver has said she wanted the structure of a Victorian novel about institutional failure to carry a story about the opioid epidemic in the county where she lives. It won the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, shared with Hernan Diaz's Trust in the first year the fiction prize went to two books, and the 2023 Women's Prize — making Kingsolver the only novelist to have won that prize twice.
→ Where it sits among the best fiction of all timePartita
Her tenth novel and her first since Demon Copperhead. Livia grows up on an Appalachian farm in a family silenced by her brother's death, finds her way out through music, and wins a scholarship to study piano — into a world of thrilling knowledge, risky passions and class barriers she had not seen coming. Faber describes it as structured like a musical composition, and as a book about who gets to decide what counts as art. Published 6 October 2026 by Harper in the United States and 8 October by Faber in the United Kingdom.
Her Other Books: Essays, Poetry and Nonfiction
The novels are only half the shelf, and this is where the confusion about the count comes from — several of these are filed as novels by booksellers and even by her publisher.
- Homeland and Other Stories (1989) — Twelve short stories. Frequently listed among her novels, including on her own site, which is one reason the total is often given as eleven rather than nine.
- Holding the Line: Women in the Great Arizona Mine Strike of 1983 (1989) — Her first book of any kind: oral-history reporting on the women who ran the picket lines when an injunction stopped the men from doing it.
- Another America / Otra America (1992) — Poems, printed in English with Spanish translations facing them.
- High Tide in Tucson (1995) and Small Wonder (2002) — Two essay collections. Small Wonder was written in the year after September 2001 and is the angriest thing she has published.
- Last Stand: America's Virgin Lands (2002) — An essay on American wilderness, with photographs by Annie Griffiths Belt.
- Animal, Vegetable, Miracle (2007) — A year of eating only what her family could grow or buy locally, written with her husband and elder daughter. Her best-selling nonfiction by a wide margin.
- How to Fly (In Ten Thousand Easy Lessons) (2020) — Poetry. The other title that inflates the novel count when booksellers file it wrong.
- Coyote's Wild Home (2023) — A picture book for children, written with the naturalist Lily Urmann.
How Barbara Kingsolver Writes: Politics Through the Back Door
Kingsolver is a trained biologist — a master's in ecology and evolutionary biology, and years of scientific writing before the fiction — and it shows in how the novels are built. The setting is never scenery. In Prodigal Summer the predator-prey argument is the plot; in Flight Behavior the butterflies are not a metaphor for climate change, they are climate change, doing what displaced insects actually do.
Her method with politics is to arrive at it sideways. She almost never opens on the issue. She opens on a woman in a car, a family at a table, a boy on a floor, and the mining company or the coup or the epidemic arrives the way it arrives in a life: as something happening to people who were busy with something else. That is why the books survive their own subject matter, and why readers who say they dislike political fiction keep finishing them.
She writes in multiple voices more often than not. Five narrators in The Poisonwood Bible, three strands in Prodigal Summer, two centuries alternating in Unsheltered, a found-document collage in The Lacuna. Demon Copperhead is the exception and the reason it hits harder than the rest: one voice, first person, start to finish, and no one to cut away to.
The prose itself is warmer and plainer than the ambition suggests. She is unfashionably willing to let a character be good, and unfashionably willing to end a book on hope she has actually earned. Critics have called that sentimental. It is closer to a stated position: she does not think despair is more honest than the alternative.
Barbara Kingsolver's Novels in Order of Publication
The nine published novels: The Bean Trees (1988), Animal Dreams (1990), Pigs in Heaven (1993), The Poisonwood Bible (1998), Prodigal Summer (2000), The Lacuna (2009), Flight Behavior (2012), Unsheltered (2018) and Demon Copperhead (2022). Partita makes ten on 6 October 2026.
Only one pair has to be read in order. Pigs in Heaven (1993) is a direct sequel to The Bean Trees (1988) and takes apart the first book's ending, so read them that way round. Everything else stands alone.
Why you will see eleven, or twelve. Faber says eleven novels; her own site lists twelve titles under that heading. Both counts include Homeland and Other Stories (1989), a short-story collection, and How to Fly (2020), a book of poems. Neither is a novel. Nine is the number if you count only novels, and ten once Partita is out.
Where to Start with Barbara Kingsolver
If you have never read her
→ Demon Copperhead (2022). It is the Pulitzer winner, it is the book people are still talking about, and the single narrating voice makes it the most immediately gripping thing she has written.
If you want the novel that made her name
→ The Poisonwood Bible (1998). Five narrators, one family, and the history of Congolese independence underneath. Denser than Demon Copperhead and worth the work.
If you want the one that won her first Women's Prize
→ The Lacuna (2009). Kahlo, Rivera, Trotsky and the House Un-American Activities Committee, told through invented journals and clippings.
If you came for the nature writing
→ Prodigal Summer (2000), then Flight Behavior (2012). The biologist's books.
If you want to start at the beginning
→ The Bean Trees (1988), then Pigs in Heaven (1993) — the only pair that needs reading in sequence.
If the novels are not what you are after
→ Animal, Vegetable, Miracle (2007) is her best-selling nonfiction, and the essays in High Tide in Tucson are the shortest way into how she thinks.
Frequently asked questions about Barbara Kingsolver's books
How many books has Barbara Kingsolver written?
She has published nine novels, from The Bean Trees (1988) to Demon Copperhead (2022), with Partita making ten on 6 October 2026. Counting everything — novels, short fiction, essays, poetry, nonfiction and a children's book — she has written around eighteen books.
Why do some sources say Barbara Kingsolver wrote eleven novels?
Because they include Homeland and Other Stories (1989), which is a short-story collection, and How to Fly (In Ten Thousand Easy Lessons) (2020), which is poetry. Both appear under the novels heading on her own website and in her publisher's biography. Nine is the figure if you count only novels.
What order should I read Barbara Kingsolver's books in?
Any order, with one exception: Pigs in Heaven (1993) is a sequel to The Bean Trees (1988) and undoes its ending, so read those two in sequence. Otherwise start with Demon Copperhead and choose by subject from there.
Is Barbara Kingsolver writing a new book?
Yes. Partita, her tenth novel and her first since Demon Copperhead, is published on 6 October 2026 by Harper in the United States and on 8 October by Faber in the United Kingdom. It follows Livia, who grows up on an Appalachian farm and finds a way out through music, and is structured like a musical composition.
What is the best Barbara Kingsolver book to start with?
Demon Copperhead (2022) for her most acclaimed and most readable novel, or The Poisonwood Bible (1998) for the book that established her reputation. Readers who came for the nature writing rather than the prizes usually prefer Prodigal Summer (2000).
Did Barbara Kingsolver win the Pulitzer Prize?
Yes. Demon Copperhead won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2023, shared with Hernan Diaz's Trust — the first time the fiction prize went to two books. The Poisonwood Bible was a Pulitzer finalist in 1999 but did not win.
Has Barbara Kingsolver won the Women's Prize twice?
Yes, and she is the only novelist who has. She won the Orange Prize, as it was then called, for The Lacuna in 2010, and the Women's Prize for Fiction for Demon Copperhead in 2023.
What awards has Barbara Kingsolver won?
The Pulitzer Prize for Fiction (2023), the Women's Prize for Fiction twice (2010 and 2023), the National Humanities Medal (2000), the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, and the National Book Foundation's Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, presented on 20 November 2024 for her body of work.
Who is Barbara Kingsolver?
Barbara Kingsolver (born 8 April 1955) is an American novelist, essayist and poet, trained as a biologist, whose fiction places political and ecological questions inside the lives of ordinary people. She is best known for The Poisonwood Bible and the Pulitzer-winning Demon Copperhead.
Where was Barbara Kingsolver born, and where does she live?
She was born on 8 April 1955 in Annapolis, Maryland, and grew up in Carlisle, Kentucky. Since 2004 she has lived and farmed in south-western Virginia, which is the setting of Demon Copperhead.
Did Barbara Kingsolver live in the Congo?
Yes, for about a year, aged seven, in 1963, while her father worked there as a doctor. The experience fed The Poisonwood Bible, though the novel is researched fiction and not a memoir — the Price family is invented and the political history is drawn from the record.
Why did Barbara Kingsolver write Demon Copperhead?
She has said she wanted to write about the opioid epidemic in the county where she lives, and borrowed the structure of Dickens's David Copperfield — a Victorian novel about childhood poverty and institutional failure — to carry it. Dickens wrote in anger about the same kind of neglect, and she has described taking the shape of his book as permission to do the same.
Are Barbara Kingsolver's books connected?
Only one pair. Pigs in Heaven (1993) continues the story of Taylor and Turtle from The Bean Trees (1988). The other novels share themes — place, ecology, class — but no characters.
Sources
- Barbara Kingsolver — official site
- Barbara Kingsolver — Encyclopaedia Britannica
- Faber announces Barbara Kingsolver's new novel — Faber
- New Novel by Barbara Kingsolver Coming This Fall — Kirkus Reviews
- National Book Foundation to Present Lifetime Achievement Award to Barbara Kingsolver
Bibliography last verified 5 September 2026.
“The very least you can do in your life is figure out what you hope for.”
— Barbara Kingsolver, Animal Dreams (1990).
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