Partita

by Barbara Kingsolver

A deeply moving new novel about life and art from one of America’s greatest writers.

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 promise as an extraordinary pianist. His request, now, to see her again stirs up ghosts she’s 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 traumas 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 and deep affection, Pulitzer Prize winner Barbara Kingsolver’s unforgettable new novel reflects on class barriers, the risks of ambition, and the timeless love affair between life and art.

Genres: Fiction, Historical Fiction, Literary Fiction, Music, Audiobook, Contemporary, Book Club

560 pages, Paperback

First published October 6, 2026

About the author

Barbara Ellen Kingsolver is a Pulitzer Prize-winning American novelist, essayist, and poet. Her widely known works include The Poisonwood Bible, the tale of a missionary family in the Congo, and Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, a nonfiction account of her family's attempts to eat locally. In 2023, she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for the novel Demon Copperhead. Her work often focuses on topics such as social justice, biodiversity, and the interaction between humans and their communities and environments.
Kingsolver has received numerous awards, including the Dayton Literary Peace Prize's Richard C. Holbrooke Distinguished Achievement Award 2011 and the National Humanities Medal. After winning for The Lacuna in 2010 and Demon Copperhead in 2023, Kingsolver became the first author to win the Women's Prize for Fiction twice. Since 1993, each one of her book titles have been on the New York Times Best Seller list.
Kingsolver was raised in rural Kentucky, lived briefly in the Congo in her early childhood, and she currently lives in Appalachia. Kingsolver earned degrees in biology, ecology, and evolutionary biology at DePauw University and the University of Arizona, and worked as a freelance writer before she began writing novels. In 2000, the politically progressive Kingsolver established the Bellwether Prize to support "literature of social change".

Reviews

[Canadian Jen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Partita= a musical composition that consists of a series of dance inspired movements most famously associated with composers such as Bach.

Kingsolver takes us into the world of classical music with an intense passion in its depths.
Livia Cable was a musical prodigy to the dismay of her mother. She lost her brother at the age of 11 and it became her mission to leave home with all of its negativity and abuse. Music was her companion through grief, joy and abandonment.
She meets Sigruid while studying and the love affair takes her off her musical path. Years later, he has reached out to her. Now married, Livia is unsure she wants to meet with him. She reflects back on the hours, the days, the years of preparation and the torrid love affair that left her devastated; broken.
A lifetime of pain but finally recognising that resilience, redemption & forgiveness can take many different forms.
5⭐️
For anyone interested in listening, the music is on Spotify under her name and title.

[Angela M · Rating 5 out of 5]

Enduring a traumatic, abusive childhood and a horrible loss, Livia Bohusz has nothing but her dreams, her musical talent and her motivation left as she leaves home and becomes estranged to her family to follow those dreams . During the course of her studies she falls in love with someone who is more dedicated to a cause than to her and endures even more devastating losses that change the course of her life once again.

In this first person, introspective and alternating narrative we see Livia in those early days and decades later as Livia Chase now settled in her life having to face the revelations of family secrets and the decision about whether to reconnect with her past .

Chapters titles are named after classical music compositions or dances , or terms - none of which I was familiar with. I assumed they had meaning in the context of the chapters. That didn’t keep me from being moved by the story reflecting resilience in the face of heartache, self recognition and the knowledge that “salvation comes in its own ways”. A beautiful rendering of how a broken creative spirit rises to the call of what home and family and love really mean. This is my tenth novel by Kingsolver and she never disappoints .

I received a copy of this book from Harper Collins through Edelweiss .

[vinnie]

i have never been so excited to sob

[Lisa of Troy · Rating 1 out of 5]

What is there to like about this book?

Nothing.

This book is boring trash. The main character is unlikeable. She is supposed to be from Tennessee, but she doesn’t have a Southern accent. Yeah that happens all the time.

The narrative voice is entirely underwhelming. Every reveal is foreseeable. The author overexplains everything. It feels like Kingsolver was trying to hit a certain word count. Most of it was just boring and frankly a waste of my time.

In the last chapter, all of these random characters are trotted out. Why in the world would a reader care when Kingsolver did nothing to develop them?

This is NOT Demon Copperhead.

The Green Light at the End of the Dock (How much I spent):
Hardcover Text – $23.74 on Amazon
Audiobook – Audible – 1 Credit (Audible Premium Plus Annual – 24 Credits Membership Plan $229.50 or roughly $9.56 per credit)

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[Liz Hein · Rating 4 out of 5]

Partita is the “Heart the Lover” of 2026 - 4.5 ⭐️

[Ron Charles · Rating 4 out of 5]

To say it’s no Demon Copperhead hardly seems fair.

But that’s the unenviable starting point for Barbara Kingsolver’s new novel, Partita. One squints to read it in the glaring light of its predecessor.

Trailing clouds of glory from Charles Dickens’s classic, Demon Copperhead lounged for more than a year on the bestseller list in hardback, eventually dominated the paperback list, sold more than 3 million copies, and won a Pulitzer Prize. It was a worldwide literary event that pitted an army of enthusiastic devotees (like me) against a minority who found the novel’s relentless suffering overcooked or unbearable.

Partita is less likely to inspire such fervor. The emotional volume is softer, the range narrower, the social agenda more flyer than billboard.

Musicians will recognize that title while the rest of us are still pondering its pronunciation. About 100 pages in, the narrator explains that a partita is “a composition made of a lot of parts with different paces and moods.” Not coincidentally, that’s a fair description of this novel, which sweeps from quiet retrospection to full-throated romance and bloody crises.

Kingsolver, who went to college on a piano scholarship, lays tracks of classical music throughout the story. Its chapters are titled “Overture,” “Prelude I,” “Toccata,” etc. Her descriptions of agonizing rehearsals and triumphant concerts are engrossing, even for those of us who never tinkled the ivories past “Volga Boatmen.” And the truly devoted can....

Read the rest of this review on my Substack:
https://roncharles.substack.com/p/bar...

[Karen · Rating 4.5 out of 5]

Livia, is a middle age woman who lives on a farm in Tennessee with her husband Charlie.
She gives piano lessons to people to earn money and her husband runs the farm she inherited from her father.
She receives a phone call from an ex boyfriend from college days who wants to meet with her.
It was an extremely passionate relationship that ended with dire consequences for Livia.
When Livia went to college she was a piano prodigy with big dreams.
The things that happened to Livia after the breakup with Sigurd, ruined those chances, and they never spoke again so he didn’t know about anything.
The novel goes back and forth from the present to the past.
Music is a huge part of this novel, along with love, family, and tragedy..
Not my favorite Kingsolver… those would be
The Poisonwood Bible and Demon Copperhead, but it was an engrossing read.
Always in good hands with a Kingsolver book.

[Stephanie · Rating 4.25 out of 5]

Inject this into my veins.

Barbara Kingsolver, who has written two of my favorite books of all time: Demon Copperhead, and The Poisonwood Bible, this time dives into the world of music and literature, as the two are forever intertwined.

Well, music is the basis of this book, is centers around Livia Cable, who is a piano prodigy, and goes back-and-forth with her tumultuous past and her present passion for music. What sets forth in her life are tragic circumstances from her past that need to be reckoned with.

“I’d hit it lucky on the weather, no wind at all, clear sky, a perfect end-of-summer day. Perfectly empty or perfectly full, depending on whether you measure a day by clouds or birdsongs”

There moments of complete beauty, as only Kingsolver fans can only truly understand. The stories pacing goes back-and-forth, and there are times where I wasn’t sure whether we were in the present or the past, though I feel like that was her intentions, similar as to music - as there is no past or present when you listen to it.

While this isn’t going to be a classic, I will read everything she reads and can’t wait to see what she does next.

[Stephen the Bookworm · Rating 4 out of 5]

" No, I mean we all accumulate. Not junk but feelings. We hold onto stuff we'd be better off letting go of."

Livia Bohusz has a talent for music- playing the piano - and after the tragic death of her brother when she was ten, she has lived in the shadow of the event. But a chance to leave her rural home and the family farm and go and study music is an opportunity that she to pursue ; to leave the mother who always pulls her back.

The future for Livia does not go as planned when she meets a slightly older man named Sigurd who allows her to build dreams and embrace a new self. She is hypnotised by him.

But the path to independence, a musical career and life of love as well as building a new identity does not succeed as two events rip her life into pieces.

But why Partita? A musical composition made up of a suite of distinct contrasting dances : The Prelude; The Allemande; The Courante; The Sarabande and The Gigue. Livia's life reflects these different elements - fractured, broken and rebuilt - the composition of life.

Barbara Kingsolver knows how to take you on a journey into the human condition; never quite knowing where events may lead . The first third of the book didn't grab me as Livia's college life and initial foray into a heart-pounding new romance seemed familiar to other books but as the implications of the choices she makes ;the reasons behind her brothers' death and her parents' lack of connection with her and the reconciliation with the past and a new unexpected future are explored then the novel takes off and becomes very special The last quarter ( no spoiler) becomes a ..No, don't do it !"

Along with Ann Patchett, Elizabeth Strout, Barbara Kingsolver is one of America's finest novelist and exports.

4.5 out of 5

Thank you to Faber and Faber and NetGalley for the advance copy for an honest and unbiased review.

Quotes:
"Life doesn't give you more than one drink of water. If it gives you a drink at all."
"Everyone of our times had its own composition, so particular, that I could memorise it and play it to myself afterward.

[Kelley Dykes · Rating 2 out of 5]

I never thought the day would come that I would DNF a Barbara kingsolver book. Usually they are my epic favorites. This one I made it halfway after weeks of trying to push through it. It just bored me and I could not feel for the characters. I think the lengthy descriptions of musical technicalities really made it hard to wade through.

[Melissa (Always Behind) · Rating 4.5 out of 5]

This is a beautifully rendered novel. It's straightforward on the surface. The story of a woman who loves a man so deeply and is bereft after the loss of that relationship, and her present day life after a tragedy upends her planned path. But it's also so nuanced. It's the story of immense loss, and the toll that loss takes on people in many different ways.

This is all set with the backdrop of the piano. With piano concertos, a main character who is a pianist, and the way that the music has shaped and molded her life. The book contains a listening list, and the audiobook contains a short movement from the focal piece of the narrative.

Kingsolver's writing is so thoughtful. She uses music as an allegory to explore the trauma that many of the characters experience and the ultimate resolution of that trauma through that same music. I know that it is incredibly difficult for Kingsolver to even come close to the phenomenon that was Demon Copperhead, but she has penned a worthy follow-up in this quietly unassuming, yet powerful novel.

I alternated between listening to the audiobook, narrated superbly by Megan Tusing, and reading the print version. That gave me an even more immersive experience with this book.

[Leonie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Arguably the weakest Kingsolver I’ve read. Fragmented at best, the threads didn’t quite hold together. I’m sorry to say I didn’t connect with the character, and for me the devices used ended up interrupting the flow of the story, leading to me skimming huge sections and having to go back to reread them. 2.5, rounded up

[Tracy Greer-Hansen · Rating 4.5 out of 5]

“No, I mean we all accumulate. Not junk but feelings. We hold onto stuff we would be better off letting go.”

SYNOPSIS:
Young Livia Buhusz leaves her Tennessee home. A home that was unstable, lonely and traumatic. She leaves to the big city to a music conservatory, to make her mark as an extraordinary pianist. Just as she reaches success with her schooling , she becomes enraptured with a young man Sigurd; whom she gives so much of herself to and who breaks her spirit. She makes her way back to the original home she swore to never return to, and there she finds an overlap in the past and the present.

THOUGHTS:
To be totally upfront, I wasn’t totally sold on the first half. I found the musicality terms to be overwhelming and perhaps overwritten. Canadian Jen ,my trusted friend, told me to keep going and I am so glad I did. There were moments in the last half of the book, where the writing swept me away. You know that moment when you have to close the book and just think about what you just read? There were several of those moments. I also loved the relationship between Livia and Charlie. Solid, trustworthy and relatable.

I get the Kingsolver hype. Soon I am coming for you , Demon Copperhead.

[switterbug (Betsey) · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Music could always help me find my feelings, had stood beside me at funerals, celebrated my joys, sat patiently with my loneliness. Not just mine, every person’s. It could reach inside them to find what they needed to say or cry or yell into the ears of a hard old world.”

When a pianist prodigy from a hard working Tennessee farm town suffers from dire, radical changes to her life, her guaranteed survival is imperiled. There’s a few timelines we follow in Livia Cable’s life journey, partitioned like music--a suite, or a partita. And rather than a thin melodrama, this story is baroque in its form. It loops, spirals, and, twists back on itself and the reader’s--and protagonist’s--expectations. You may wonder if the narrator is relaible, or where is the ceiling and where is the floor of her telling. But a heads up—in case you wonder if her narration is flaky: it’s got too much gravitas to be mad or melodramatic. (But there’s madness!)

We follow multiple timelines of Livia’s life.These time changes aren’t tough to follow, but the past and present prowl around a bit. I paid close attention, afraid I might miss something crucial. The back page (p. 335) lists the assorted pieces to listen to that match the select chapters (I think she should have placed the list in front of the book to avoid inadvertent glimpses of the last page of the story). In any case, I actually listened to each piece before each page and then at the end of the paired section. It added at least 60% more depth and atmosphere to whatever I was reading. Just find them on YT—it’s easy! But listen to those gorgeous, relevant pieces!

Truthfully, I might be the only one who personally ranks this novel higher than Demon Copperhead. I’m not saying that Partita is a better book, but I relate to it more because of the seven years of classical piano I took in my youth. I even played annually in front of the jury. I wasn’t a prodigy like Livia, but I met a few. I was prodigy-adjacent and could have been even better. My teacher said I would be orchestra-conducive if only I practiced more! OK, excuse me for tooting my own horn (something I don’t commonly do) and then showing my failure—(I’m more apt to do that!).

Livia’s father passed away years ago, and her mother, an unaffectionate hoarder, has just died, leaving her distinctive signs everywhere all over the house. There’s a massive wall between Livia and her mother that will never be extinguished. Livia’s brother, Cyrus, killed himself as a teenager—her brother, her best friend—she was eleven at the time, yet their mother’s inscrutable mothering shields Livia from knowing if her mother is exhibiting contempt, hate, or merely overprotective extremity.

Going to university allowed Livia to follow her musical, artistic aspirations. She was introduced to successful, sophisticated people in classical music and the concert career path. This was in the 1990s (perhaps early aughts). She also experiences a passionate, lustful, unparalleled love affair with Sigurd, an activist and political organizer. Livia is not interested in politics—she is devoted to her music and her talent as a pianist is so transcendent that in addition to enchanting Sigurd romantically, she bewitches him musically as well. They captivate each other.

Livia has it all, from the outside. A burgeoning career doing her favorite thing, and a love so profound and incomparable that there is nothing else for her to ask for. One of the most serious ironies in the novel is how the story navigates from chord to cord (you're not supposed to grok that yet).

Of Chopin’s B Minor Prelude:

“This one is quiet, his testament to the never-ending ways of grief...The sadness is all in the melody line...a slow arpeggio trying to climb up out of the dark, but after a few notes of rising, it falls back down. ...It presses your chest with this awful hope that you’re going to get up into the light, and at one point, you almost do; the melody hovers around a major chord. But no. It slides back to the minor, and finally, softly creeps away. It’s the God’s honest truth of grief. It doesn’t resolve; it will always be there. It’s going to walk with you.”

I am mesmerized by Barbara Kingsolver once again, and the suite concludes with its greatest movement. One final partita, then silence.

I almost took off a quarter star for a minor plot hole, but the book was too darned phenomenal to do that. But it deserves a mention that I will hide, so you don't have to read it. The surgeon and surgical team would absolutely have known that Livia was pregnant. That's almost the primary thing the doctor wants to know before surgery. A pregnancy test of the first order would have been done. I should know--I'm an RN. And there would have been no "mistake" at that point in her pregnancy. I'm guessing Kingsolver and her editors could not find a way around it and just hoped we wouldn't notice.

[Jane · Rating 2 out of 5]

I am a musician, and I understand all of the musical references, but that still didn’t rescue this for me. I simply could not connect with the main characters, other than Charlie, Livia’s caring and kind husband. I found this to be a slog, boring and sad. I didn’t even find the writing to be that impressive. I had wonderful expectations for this, but honestly, if Barbara Kingsolver’s name were not on this book, I would never have guessed that it came from the same pen as The Poisonwood Bible or Demon Copperhead. So disappointed, as I had huge hopes for this one. I am honestly not sure why I finished it.

[Colin Jack]

I haven’t read a single page yet, but here’s what I do know: Barbara Kingsolver is about to hit us with heartbreak, class commentary, music metaphors, and at least one character who makes you question all your life choices.

If Demon Copperhead taught me anything, it’s that Kingsolver can make you laugh, gasp, and marvel at the sheer precision of her storytelling. Partita promises all that, but with pianos, ghosts from the past, and a protagonist juggling love, ambition, and long-buried secrets.

I’m here for it. I will be fully invested in Livia Cable’s choices, cheer for her triumphs, and probably celebrate every exquisitely framed sentence.

5/5 stars in advance, because optimism.

[Bkwmlee · Rating 4.5 out of 5]

4.5 stars

Barbara Kingsolver’s newest novel Partita is a beautifully rendered, deeply introspective novel about the myriad ways that life and art can intertwine to create moments both tender and harsh, soothing and chaotic, happy and sad. When we first meet the story’s protagonist Livia Bohusz, she is a middle-aged woman living a modest, peaceful life with her husband Charlie on the farm in Tennessee where they both grew up – until one day, Livia receives a phone call from Sigurd, a man with whom she had a passionate but tumultuous love affair back when she was a 20-year-old piano prodigy studying at a music conservatory in Indiana. Sigurd’s request to see Livia again stirs up traumatic memories of a past filled with loss and resentment that she would rather keep buried. The rest of the story, then, alternates between past and present, with the first-person narrative from Livia’s point of view giving us a front row seat to the trials and tribulations of her life. In many ways, Livia’s experiences parallel the ebbs and flows of the musical compositions that are mentioned throughout the story (there is a list of pivotal pieces at the end of the book, along with page numbers referring back to the relevant scenes), and Kingsolver cleverly titles each chapter with a musical term which I assume has significance to things that happen in the chapter (I’m not a classical music person so I’m not 100% familiar with each term, but I recognized a few of them just from having come across them in other contexts). I especially appreciate the way Kingsolver gives readers intimate insight into Livia’s thoughts and feelings at different stages of her life through the first-person narrative voice. With that said however, I have to admit that I was a bit apprehensive initially because stories told in first person can be a hit or miss for me – but Kingsolver proves to be a master at it in this case, as I was completely captivated by Livia telling her own story from the very first page. As a flawed protagonist, Livia could of course be frustrating at times (more than once, I felt like I wanted to shake some sense into her), but even so, I loved that she was portrayed in a nuanced way. In essence, we are given intimate insight into Livia’s thoughts and feelings at different stages of her life, which allows us to witness the evolution of her character as she reflects upon the past in her current present. This is, without a doubt, a character-driven story where the protagonist goes through a lot, but learns and grows from those experiences in the process.

My one complaint about this book would be its ending, which I felt was too abrupt and also didn’t match the emotional intensity of the rest of the story. In addition, it also felt to me that in order to truly appreciate the way that the ending played out, you need to have some familiarity with classical music, whereas I didn’t have that feeling with the rest of the story, even though the entire story is structured liked a musical composition. It is mostly because of the ending (and a few other minor things) that I ultimately rated this one 4.5 stars, despite the fact that, up until the last chapter or so, this was pretty much a 5 star read all the way through.

This is my first Barbara Kingsolver novel and it certainly won’t be my last! I can definitely see why Kingsolver won the Pulitzer Prize (which reminds me that I still need to read her prize-winning novel, Demon Copperhead ), as the first thing that stood out to me as I was reading Partita is the beautiful, lyrical prose, which honestly blew me away. Kingsolver truly gets at the emotional core of both the character and story with her writing and I’m definitely interested in reading more – luckily, she has a pretty big backlist to explore, which I am absolutely looking forward to!

For those who have read Partita , I recommend also reading this Goodreads interview with Barbara Kingsolver where she talks about the inspiration for the story and also provides some additional context that really enhanced my engagement with the book (though I don’t see any major spoilers, probably best to wait until you’re done reading the book to check out the interview): https://www.goodreads.com/interviews/....

Received ARC from Harper via NetGalley.

[Cherie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Oh my goodness, I love Barbara Kingsolver. Demon Copperhead, The Poisonwood Bible, Prodigal Summer are all favorites of mine. I was so excited to get an advanced copy of this book.

Livia is a remarkable pianist. Her childhood revolves around the hours she spends perfecting her craft. After receiving a scholarship to a prestigious music school, she leaves home, putting strained relationships with her family behind her. While at the music school, she meets Sigurd, a political activist, who becomes her lover. After a freak accident, Livia is forced to reevaluate what she wanted from life. Years later, a call from Sigurd makes her question her choices and face her past.

This was another 5 ⭐ book for me. I loved Livia and related to her so much - making big decisions that you question, life taking unexpected turns, learning to take the good with the bad. And of course, the book is typical Barbara Kingsolver; brilliantly written, beautiful prose, a story that keeps the reader second guessing, loveable characters. It was amazing!

HOWEVER, I am also a professional pianist. There were so many references to piano techniques, composers, piano repertoire, musical terminology. I wonder if someone who is not musically trained will have the same experience with the novel that I did. Certainly not that they couldn't, I just found that many of the sections discussing her music would be much more impactful if the reader has some sort of musical knowledge. For example, "My triumph in the preliminaries, and then onstage with all those exquisitely black-clad adults, heads cocked, bows tilted at the ready as I threw my whole upper body into the falling minor second, falling minor third of the opening motif, was the peak of my seventeen years." Or, "The Turkish march is all up and up, with its octave-wide, wobbly marches up the scales like a toddler pretending to be a king, and the laughing, trilled B-flat at the top..."

Overall, I LOVED this book and it's likely one that I'll reread again. I hope that others have the same experience that I did with the novel.

Many, many thanks to NetGalley and Faber and Faber for an advanced copy. It's scheduled to be published on October 6, 2026.

[Karen.J. · Rating 3 out of 5]

🌟🌟🌟

Once again because of all the great reviews I was expecting more from the book unfortunately it just didn’t work for me.

[aleksandra]

dnf 37%

Very, very unfortunately, I'm not feeling this book at all. I genuinely believed I would devour this story in almost one sitting, as I'm in the mood for music-centered stories, but I felt no connection to the characters, nor did I care enough to continue to find out the reason why the two mcs parted their ways.

[Bianca · Rating 3.5 out of 5]

Partita was one of my most anticipated books of the year, as I've become quite fond of Kingsolver's writing.
Our protagonist, Livia, is a talented pianist, growing up in an Appalachian locality, within a modest family. Her mother is abusive, her father is quite passive, busy making a living. Livia's saviour and obsession is the music.

Tragedies, family disunity, broken dreams and forging a path forward - are some of the themes of this novel. Finding contentment with a more modest life is not to be dismissed.

I'm only rating this 3.5 stars because I didn't feel as emotionally touched as I had expected to feel, especially since so much was about one's love of music and playing the piano and I love music and wish I could play the piano.

[devon marie · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book was hard for me to rate. For the first half or two-thirds, easily, I struggled. And I am surprised by that, because on paper I should have LOVED everything about this book's setup. Livia is a music student at IU on a piano scholarship. She comes from small town USA and had to focus almost exclusively on piano growing up to stand a chance at getting into a school on scholarship, which is the only way she'd be able to afford attending. Swap the instrument and the school for another Indiana university and you have me (except I had parents more like Charlie's, thankfully). The book is crammed with music, the music I love; the kind of music that has always, to me, felt like it existed somewhere above us and we merely brush against its greatness once in a while.

But when she gets to IU... she loses her mind over a boy and is generally just an insufferable wretch of a protagonist. I am not sure if we were supposed to sympathize with her but I pretty resolutely did not. She was naive, and rude, and belittling, and immature. She flopped around and moped instead of taking any agency over her life. Sigurd came off the more likeable of the two and I am not sure whether or not that was the point. The chapters of her disastrous last summer at IU were agonizing to read and I dragged it out for weeks. I don't want to get into spoilers of the plot but the "horrible thing that happened to her" was a huge disappointment for me, plotwise, because why are our stories always this, in some way?

But then Barbara Kingsolver does her thing where she wallops you over the head with such a heartfelt and emotionally satisfying ending that had me put down my e-reader and just hold my head in my hands and now how do I rate this book?

If you can get past Livia at her worst, Livia at her best is wonderful and the ending of the book so, so poignant. But Livia at her worst is pretty genuinely awful.

[Tammy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Kingsolver is among my favorite authors and Partita is another of her keenly observed and brilliantly written works. The main character is piano prodigy and her talent is her ticket out of dysfunctional family burdened by tragic loss. Unfortunately, heartbreaking loss isn’t finished with Livia as she heads off to the illustrious Jacobs School of Music at Indiana University and returns forever changed.

[Ruth L. · Rating 2 out of 5]

The book was made up of moments that were great, but that is not enough to hold a novel together. I know a lot of people will like this, but not me.

[jocelyn • coolgalreading · Rating 5 out of 5]

this wasn't long enough 😭

[Gill Paul · Rating 5 out of 5]

Since POISONWOOD BIBLE, I auto-buy Barbara Kingsolver novels on publication, knowing they are going to take me deep inside her unique characters' heads and be beautifully written. If I were forced at gunpoint to choose my top-favorite novelist of all time, it would be her. So I positively inhaled PARTITA, galloping through, neglecting chores, partner and friends to find out what becomes of Livia and Sigurd and Charlie. And I adored it, but soon I am going to go back and re-read with my writer's head on rather than my fangirl one, to analyse just how cleverly she constructed this dual-narrative story.

Livia is a supremely talented pianist, a music student who can play a Ravel piece that only a few pianists in the world can manage. I had misgivings from the start about Sigurd, the impossibly beautiful man, who interrupts her rehearsal time before an important performance in order to seduce her. That was an alarm bell for me, as was the fact that he love-bombed her. This is not a spoiler, by the way, since you know from the start they are no longer together.

The story is told first person, in two timelines – Livia as a student, and as a woman married to a farmer called Charlie and teaching piano many years later. There's a trail of clues about what happened to her brother, who died when she was eleven, about their abusive childhood, and about the catastrophic damage that Livia endures following the end of the relationship with Sigurd.

Who knew that Barbara Kingsolver would be so good at writing sex? My favorite bits, though, were her descriptions of the feelings of a pianist's fingers on the piano keys, the built-in muscle memory, the sweeping, all-consuming joy of playing great music written centuries earlier. I'm not sure that Livia got under my skin quite as much as Demon Copperhead did, but I know I will be thinking this novel for a long time.

[Linden · Rating 4 out of 5]

Livia is a farm girl with exceptional talent who gets a university music scholarship. While at school, she meets a seemingly irresistible man and that is when her run of bad luck starts. She is injured, almost dies, and can no longer play the piano well. She goes home to Tennessee to a dying father, a cruel mother, and the memory of her beloved older brother. There are numerous musical references in the novel, including insight into the title: “A partita will never be all happy rondos, or all andantes in a minor key. You’ll usually have a prelude, a thrilling allemande, maybe a slow sexy sarabande—the contrast is the point. The parts are all different, and the artist’s work is to make them all add up to a something that feels whole.” Although her life has taken an unexpected course, she realizes that “surviving in broken parts is not such a bad thing.” Thanks to Edelweiss and the publisher for the opportunity to review this advance copy.

[Lee-Ann · Rating 4.5 out of 5]

Barbara Kingsolver is a master at writing about people who live on the fringes of society: the castoffs, the oddballs, the people who don’t fit in. And I love her for it.

Here we meet Livia, a young girl growing up in rural Tennessee in the aftermath of her brother’s suicide, with an abusive mother and an emotionally unavailable father. A piano prodigy, she fights her way out of her impoverished hometown on a college scholarship, where she meets Sigurd, a Marxist and union organizer who captivates her. He gives her things she’s never had before: flattery, attention, great sex, and an entirely different way of looking at the world. Then he destroys her.

The story moves between Livia’s troubled childhood and young adulthood and her present-day life, where Sigurd reappears, seemingly determined to reclaim a place in her world and upend the predictability of her marriage (can we talk about how much I LOVE CHARLIE?) and small-town existence. A tragic accident during her college years derailed the future she had envisioned, but Sigurd’s return forces her to question whether she settled for the life she has or whether this is where she was always meant to end up. And just as she begins to reconsider her past and present, shocking revelations about her family’s history threaten to change everything she thought she knew.

The writing was SO good, the kind where you go back and read passages over again just to appreciate how beautifully they’re written. That kind of good. But there were many classical music metaphors and descriptions of how various pieces of music related to Livia’s life, especially early on in the book. And as someone who doesn’t much care about classical music, I skimmed those parts.

BUT the characters? I loved them. Livia was so relatable, especially for anyone who grew up with a less-than-perfect childhood and knows how much those early experiences can shape the person you become. Kingsolver has a gift for making these imperfect people feel achingly human. There is much heartbreak and tragedy, but there is also resilience and healing.

So, while this wasn’t quite a five-star love affair for me (close though!), Kingsolver’s beautiful writing and compelling characters made it well worth the read. The ending was just right, leaving me with that warm, full feeling in my chest that only a truly good book can deliver.

[Aggie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sometimes life absolutely trashes you, and you're never going to be 100% the same person again. But honestly? The coolest, bravest thing about humans is that we pick up the pieces and keep pushing forward anyway.

Reading Barbara Kingsolver is pure joy. Her words remind me that even if life turns out ordinary- and even if you look older and more weary than most- as long as your heart is beating, you are still surviving.

♥♥ This audiobook made me hear some words so poignant they reached my heart, slowing its pace to a gentle, quiet calm. ♥♥

[Jules · Rating 5 out of 5]

I hear a lot of writers talking about pulling their readers in with the very first sentence of a book. Barbara Kingsolver absolutely killed it with her opening line, quite literally. I was instantly hooked.

In Partita, Livia turns to music following the death of her brother when she is just 11 years old. Her relationship with her mother becomes strained, not only due to grief but also because her mother is unable to understand how music is ever going to give Livia a future. Defiant, Livia earns a scholarship but needs to work part time jobs to make ends meet. One day, a completely unforeseeable event forces her to face an uncertain and unexpected future.

I have to admit to being initially unsure about Partita, probably for about the first third of the book. I looked up the meaning of partita and in a classical musical sense, it means "a suite of dances, usually written for a solo instrument". In Kingsolver's novel, Livia is a pianist and I struggled a little with the technical musical elements in that first third of the book. However, should you find your reading of Partita to be similar to mine, please do stick with it as I really do think it comes into it's own later on.

I am a huge fan of Barbara Kingsolver. She has such a natural way with words, talking about love and human experience with great fervour. I also follow Kingsolver on Instagram and therefore know her stance on some of the political elements going on in America right now. Like in Demon Copperhead, she brings these elements into her novels and, in Partita, she deals with these sensitively and with compassion.

Livia's life beyond music is ultimately what turned this into a 5 star read for me. Partita is a novel that shows that, despite all that life throws at you, our resilience can almost be super human - stretching beyond grief, pain and loss, and finding a way to love, happiness and forgiveness. A truly exceptional novel.