Publishers Weekly
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Pulitzer winner Kingsolver (Demon Copperhead) returns with an engrossing story of a middle-aged woman’s forsaken talent and chance for redemption. Livia Cable, once a promising pianist, lives on a farm in Tennessee with her husband, Charlie, where she offers music lessons. Glimmers of her old life resurface with an unexpected phone call from a former boyfriend, Sigurd. From there, the novel unfurls on parallel tracks, following middle-aged Livia as she weighs whether to let Sigurd back into her life and a 20-year-old Livia as she meets Sigurd in 1989 while attending Indiana University. Though she is already seriously dating a classmate, young Livia falls for the handsome Sigurd, a typesetter and radical leftist. In the present, Livia’s reflections on their campus romance hint at how she came to be relegated to a life of “low expectations after getting shot down for chasing the pie in her sky.” Some of the dialogue feels overly expository, but Kingsolver shines in her character work, beautifully conveying how Livia’s mind is shaped by music, as in her reflections on tension and resolution (“a brief bridge of suspense moving right on to the next one, one after another, these small, satisfied hungers in succession”). This tragic story of long-held secrets will keep readers turning pages. (Oct.)

Kirkus
Copyright © Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

A phone call from her past disrupts the tenuously reconstructed life of a concert pianist turned farmer’s wife. We know from the beginning that Livia Cable is the battered survivor of her brother Cyrus’ death by suicide, a devastating romance, and a career-ending injury. Only 11 when Cyrus stepped in front of a train, she was already marked out as different in her rural Tennessee hometown by her extraordinary musical ability. The siblings had huddled together against their angry mother’s frequent beatings, and Livia still feels abandoned by Cyrus years later, when she picks up the phone to hear the voice of Sigurd, the fiery labor organizer she loved and lost to “the revolution” while on scholarship at the Indiana University School of Music. Now married to kind, steady childhood friend Charlie, Livia looks back on her affair with Sigurd as she struggles to deal with the recent death of her mother, a compulsive hoarder who left a house stuffed with junk to be disposed of and bitter memories that haven’t faded over time. Kingsolver skillfully juggles the two time frames to unravel Livia’s complicated feelings about the life she lost when her right hand was crushed and the life she has now as a country piano teacher. A partita, she explains to Sigurd early on, “is a composition made of a lot of parts with a lot of different moods…the artist’s work is to make them all add up to something that feels whole.” That’s precisely what Kingsolver does in this beautifully paced and judged narrative, which builds to revelations uncovered amid the piles of trash in Livia’s childhood home about the reasons for Cyrus’ suicide (clearly foreshadowed) and their mother’s rage (startling and heartbreaking). A fierce belief that great art is for everyone joins Kingsolver’s familiar preoccupations with class distinctions, social injustice, and the complex bonds of family and community in a tender denouement. Brilliant, affecting work from one of contemporary literature’s masters. Copyright © Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Book list
From Booklist, Copyright © American Library Association. Used with permission.

The “Overture” to this ravishing music-propelled novel reveals the first tragedy in the narrator’s life: her older brother’s shocking death by suicide. In “Prelude I,” many years later, she is shaken by a phone call that reignites the pain of another severe loss. The next movement reaches back some two decades to when a scholarship to a famous music school in Indiana liberates aspiring pianist Livia from the gloom of her Tennessee home. Her artistry, ambition, discipline, and rigor are all-consuming, until blood-and-flesh desire ambushes her in the form of Sigurd, a sexy radical. The crushing consequence of their entanglement is gradually revealed as Livia returns home to her family’s dairy farm to try to live with her anguish, taking up the hardscrabble existence she worked so hard to escape. As she discovers hidden truths about her mother's hoarding and her brother's despair, she finds her way to a different cadence of love and the revelation that the glory of classical music can be shared anywhere with anyone. Following her Pulitzer Prize–winning Demon Copperhead (2023), Kingsolver presents an enrapturing, brilliantly plotted, deeply personal, and profoundly insightful celebration of the life of the land, the skills and struggles of farmers, and the transcendent power of art to bring us together, make us feel "more alive," and make us whole. HIGH-DEMAND

Library Journal
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Kingsolver's profound spiritual novels span generations in sweeping yet intimate ways, layering the literary with the real so that readers can immerse themselves in an intellectualism akin to A. S. Byatt's and a visceral, embodied world of rawness and feeling. Her latest is a brilliantly prismatic story, told in the past and the present, of Livia Cable, a woman who once showed promise as a pianist but has settled into married life in the farm country where she grew up. She is drawn out of her peace by a phone call from the old lover who first introduced her to socialism and played a role in how she processed childhood traumas, familial estrangement, and passions. He chose politics over her, and she felt broken, both by his emotional abandonment and its physical effects on her. Livia may have lost her ability to play the piano, but she tells her story in a way that will make ghosts dance and stir songs of longing, loss, and legacy for readers. VERDICT Kingsolver is one of the finest living writers, and her latest will join Demon Copperfield and The Poisonwood Bible as another modern classic.—Emily Bowles