The voice takes some getting used to, but from the start the title character feels like a reliable narrator, telling it very much like it was. If you’re familiar with the Charles Dickens classic, you’ll follow the story’s beats and chuckle when you meet the Pegs, Tommy Waddles and UHaul Pyles instead of the Peggottys, Tommy Traddles and Uriah Heep, but the story certainly stands on its own. But you don’t need to have taken an English lit seminar to enjoy this novel. “Demon Copperhead,” the latest from Barbara Kingsolver, is a modern reimagining of “David Copperfield,” set in Appalachia. It all comes across as entirely authentic, the work of a writer wholly appalled by what she sees, but who herself will not flinch from its ugly reality, or its human cost, not even for a moment.“Demon Copperhead” by Barbara Kingsolver (Harper) Yet, the granularity of its detail makes you feel like you are living alongside Demon for every minute of his blighted life, and Kingsolver never puts a foot wrong. Other novels that feature abject poverty and misery can sometimes transcend into beauty – Douglas Stuart’s Shuggie Bain is a good example – but Demon Copperfield remains astonishingly bleak, misfortune piled on top of disappointment, then drugs, tragedy and death. It is not a particularly easy one to read, either. I'm a kidnap negotiator - here's how to stay calm in incredibly stressful situations 26 May, 2023 Author Laura Kay: 'The character who most resembles me? Succession's Kendall Roy' 25 May, 2023 Wish I Was Here by M John Harrison is one of the most original books about writing I've read 25 May, 2023 This family reunion is brief, however, as he is quickly palmed off on to the local high-school football coach, in the hope that his height and build will mark him out as a future athlete. When his next foster family proves comparably dysfunctional, Demon takes off in pursuit of his only living relative, a grandmother he has never met. After his mother becomes another statistic in America’s opioid crisis, he is fostered out to a grizzled farmer who possesses no paternal instincts but does require cheap labour to tend his tobacco farm. “Anyone will tell you the born of this world are marked from the get-out, win or lose.”ĭemon’s kin mostly lose. “Kids born to the junkie is a junkie,” Demon writes. He is a “redneck”, a “hillbilly” or, as the author also suggests at one point – a sly nod to Hillary Clinton’s summation of vast swathes of America’s electorate – a “deplorable”, growing up in the Appalachian Mountains of Virginia where poverty is inescapable.

“First, I got myself born,” Demon announces on page one (of 546), recounting the trauma of his difficult birth to a single mother in a ramshackle trailer.

Demon copperfield