Author Guide · Literary Fiction and 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 there. She trained as a biologist before she wrote a novel, and it shows: the landscape in her books is never scenery. She was the first writer to win 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 guide has all nine novels in the order they were published, plus Partita, out in October 2026, and where to start.
By Lisanne Swart · 9 novels · 1 forthcoming · Pulitzer Prize 2023 · Female Authors · 1988–2026 · Updated September 2026
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Quick answer
Barbara Kingsolver has published nine novels, from The Bean Trees (1988) to Demon Copperhead (2022). The next, Partita, is out on 6 October 2026 in the United States and 8 October in the United Kingdom. You will also see higher counts, including from her own publisher, because some lists include the short-story collection Homeland and Other Stories (1989). If you have never read her, start with Demon Copperhead; for the novel that made her reputation, The Poisonwood Bible. All her novels in order →
Where to Start with Barbara Kingsolver
If you have never read her
→ Demon Copperhead. The Pulitzer winner, and her most gripping book.
If you want the novel that made her name
→ The Poisonwood Bible. Five narrators, one family, and the history of Congolese independence underneath. Denser than Demon Copperhead and worth the work.
If you came for the nature writing
→ Prodigal Summer, then Flight Behavior. The biologist’s books.
If you want to start at the beginning
→ The Bean Trees, then Pigs in Heaven, the only pair that needs reading in sequence.
If the novels are not what you are after
→ Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, and the essays in High Tide in Tucson. Then my best fiction books of all time for where her novels sit.
Barbara Kingsolver Books in Order, from 1988 to 2026
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The Bean Trees
A young woman leaves rural Kentucky in a worn-out Volkswagen, is handed an abandoned Cherokee toddler in Oklahoma, and builds an unlikely household in Tucson. Kingsolver wrote it at night, through the insomnia of pregnancy, and it set out the themes she has worked on ever since: displacement, chosen family, and politics arriving through the back door of a personal story.
back to the shelfAnimal Dreams
Codi Noline returns to her Arizona hometown to look after her father, who is losing his memory, and is drawn into the town’s fight against a mining company whose pollution threatens their orchards. Told in alternating voices, Codi’s and her father’s, with her sister writing home from Nicaragua. It won the PEN/USA West Fiction Award and the Edward Abbey Award for Ecofiction.
back to the shelfPigs 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. It won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction and was her first New York Times bestseller.
back to the shelfThe Poisonwood Bible
A Baptist missionary takes his wife and four daughters to the Belgian Congo in 1959, on the eve of independence and the coup that followed. The family’s unravelling is told in five alternating female voices, none of them his. A Pulitzer finalist, and the novel that moved her from a well-reviewed writer to a major one. She drew on the time her own family spent in the Congo when she was seven, though the book is researched fiction rather than memoir.
back to the shelfProdigal 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 long argument about pesticides. The most explicitly ecological of her novels, and the one where the landscape does most of the work.
back to the shelfThe 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 in 2010, the first of her two.
back to the shelfFlight 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 far from where they should be. Scientists and news crews follow. Kingsolver uses the spectacle to write about class, faith and what it takes for someone to change their mind about the climate.
back to the shelfUnsheltered
Two families in the same collapsing house in Vineland, New Jersey, a century and a half apart: a journalist watching her finances and her roof give way in the present, and a science teacher trying to teach Darwin to a hostile town in the 1870s. The chapters alternate, and the last words of each become the title of the next.
back to the shelfDemon Copperhead
Dickens’s David Copperfield moved to present-day Lee County, Virginia, and narrated by a boy born to a teenage mother in a single-wide, who passes through foster care, tobacco farms, high-school football and OxyContin. It shared the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction with Hernan Diaz’s Trust, the first time the fiction prize went to two books, and won the 2023 Women’s Prize, making Kingsolver the first writer to win it twice.
back to the shelfPartita
Her first novel 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 intellectual discovery, risky passions and class barriers she had not seen coming. Faber describes it as organised like a musical composition. Kingsolver has said it grew out of asking why the arts are divided by class, and what that costs.
back to the shelfHer Other Books: Stories, Essays, Poetry and Nonfiction
The novels are only half the shelf, and this is where the confusion about the count comes from: the story collection and the poetry are sometimes filed among the novels.
Open a group to see the titles.
Stories, poetry and essays
5
Homeland and Other Stories 1989
Twelve short stories. Sometimes listed among her novels, which is why some counts come out higher.
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Another America / Otra America 1992
Poems, printed in English with Spanish translations facing them.
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High Tide in Tucson 1995
Essays, and the shortest way into how she thinks.
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Small Wonder 2002
Essays written in response to September 2001.
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How to Fly (In Ten Thousand Easy Lessons) 2020
Poetry.
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Nonfiction and a children’s book
4
Holding the Line: Women in the Great Arizona Mine Strike of 1983 1989
Reporting on the women who held the picket lines during the strike.
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Last Stand: America’s Virgin Lands 2002
An essay on American wilderness, with photographs by Annie Griffiths Belt.
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Animal, Vegetable, Miracle 2007
A year of eating only what her family could grow or buy locally, written with her husband Steven L. Hopp and her daughter Camille Kingsolver.
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Coyote’s Wild Home 2023
A picture book for children, written with her daughter Lily Kingsolver.
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The years · 1955–2026
Quick facts about Barbara Kingsolver
- Known for
- Barbara Kingsolver is known for novels rooted in place and in the political and ecological forces that shape ordinary lives, from The Poisonwood Bible to Demon Copperhead.
- 1955
- Born in Annapolis, Maryland
- 2022
- Demon Copperhead
- 2026
- Next novel, Partita
- Born
- 8 April 1955, Annapolis, Maryland; raised in Carlisle, Kentucky
- Trained as
- A biologist: BA from DePauw, MS in ecology and evolutionary biology from the University of Arizona
- The Congo
- Lived there with her family at seven, while her father worked as a doctor
- Lives
- On a farm in south-western Virginia, since 2004
- Novels
- Nine, 1988 to 2022; Partita in October 2026
- Pulitzer Prize
- Fiction, 2023, for Demon Copperhead, shared with Trust
- Women’s Prize
- Won twice, 2010 and 2023, the first writer to do so
- Other honours
- National Humanities Medal (2000); National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters (2024)
The red mark is 2022: Demon Copperhead, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the Women’s Prize, and where this guide suggests starting.
How Barbara Kingsolver Writes: Politics Through the Back Door
Kingsolver is a trained biologist, with a master’s in ecology and evolutionary biology, and it shows in how the novels are built. The setting is never scenery. In Prodigal Summer the predator-and-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 is warmer and plainer than the ambition suggests. She is unfashionably willing to let a character be good, and to end a book on hope she has earned. Critics have called that sentimental. It is closer to a position: despair is not more honest than the alternative.
Watch
Barbara Kingsolver in conversation with Oprah
Oprah talks with Kingsolver about Demon Copperhead, her 98th Book Club pick, joined by members of Oprah’s Book Club.
Frequently asked questions about Barbara Kingsolver’s books
How many books has Barbara Kingsolver written?
Nine novels, from The Bean Trees (1988) to Demon Copperhead (2022), with Partita following on 6 October 2026. Counting everything, novels, short stories, essays, poetry, nonfiction and a children’s book, she has published around eighteen books.
Why do some sources give a higher number of novels?
Because they count Homeland and Other Stories (1989), a short-story collection, among the novels, and sometimes the poetry collection How to Fly (2020) as well. Her UK publisher Faber calls Partita her eleventh novel. Counting only novels, it is her tenth.
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.
What is Barbara Kingsolver’s new book?
Partita, her first novel since Demon Copperhead, 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.
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 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.
Has Barbara Kingsolver won the Women’s Prize twice?
Yes, and she was the first writer to do so. 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’s Richard C. Holbrooke Distinguished Achievement Award (2011), and the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters (2024).
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, the corner of Appalachia where Demon Copperhead is set.
Did Barbara Kingsolver live in the Congo?
Yes. When she was seven, her father, a doctor, moved the family to the Congo. The experience fed The Poisonwood Bible, though the novel is researched fiction, not memoir: the Price family is invented.
Why did Barbara Kingsolver write Demon Copperhead?
To write about the opioid epidemic in the part of Appalachia where she lives. She borrowed the structure of Dickens’s David Copperfield, a Victorian novel about childhood poverty and institutional failure, to carry it.
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 and class, but no characters.
Footnotes
- Barbara Kingsolver — Wikipedia
- Barbara Kingsolver — Encyclopaedia Britannica
- Faber announces Barbara Kingsolver’s new novel — Faber
- New Novel by Barbara Kingsolver Coming This Fall — Kirkus Reviews
- Demon Copperhead — Wikipedia
- Animal Dreams — Wikipedia
- Unsheltered — Wikipedia
- Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction — Wikipedia
- National Book Foundation to Present Lifetime Achievement Award to Barbara Kingsolver
Bibliography last verified 21 September 2026. Partita is listed at its announced publication dates. The upload date of the video below could not be confirmed and is left out of this page’s structured data.
The notes on this page are all mine,
and the books are all hers.
Lisanne x
Written by Lisanne Swart, who has curated reading lists and author guides at lisanneswart.com since 2021.
See more on her personal bookshelf.
“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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