Barbara Kingsolver’s last novel, 2022’s “Demon Copperhead,” became an international bestseller and netted her the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Despite having published books for over 35 years, Kingsolver says the overwhelming global response made her feel self-conscious.

“I found it a little difficult to start the next novel,” she admits.

To avoid the possibility of comparison, the multi-award-winning author decided to do something completely different. “I thought, ‘I’m going to write a little love story,’” she says. “Well, then it grew.”

Her new novel, “Partita” (out now from Harper), explores the repercussions of a life-changing love affair and the complex realities of the musician’s life. In typical Kingsolver fashion, the story covers so much more: class, healthcare, trauma, family, life in Appalachia, and, most significantly, our human longing for art and beauty.

As “Partita” begins, middle-aged Livia sees her quiet farm-country life rattled by a surprise phone call from her first love. Their conversation unearths the ghost of their brief and devastating romance and the secrets Livia has buried for decades. “Partita” then unfolds in two timelines: the past, in which Livia was a music conservatory student estranged from her home and family and passionately dedicated to becoming a concert pianist, while falling in love for the first time; and the present, in which Livia, having found peace in marriage and community in her rural hometown, must tackle the hoarded piles in her recently deceased mother’s house and her complicated grief, a process suddenly thwarted by her ex-lover’s voice at the end of the line. 

Kingsolver says she wanted her protagonist to be a pianist. The author herself is an accomplished musician who attended DePauw University on a scholarship for piano before choosing to study biology. In “Partita,” the author says she enjoyed writing about music and classical musicians, a world so familiar to her. “I thought, ‘Why have I waited so long to do this?’” she says.

This subject also felt timely. The author muses that in times of economic worry, people hunker down into practicalities and necessities and tend to feel like art is optional. “It’s something that we can see in our country at every level, resources being pulled back from the arts,” Kingsolver says. “(But) hard times are the times we need art the most. So I thought it would be worth writing a book that asks the question, ‘What is art for? What is music for? Why do we need it?’” The author explains that the longing for art and beauty explored in “Partita” is another, bigger kind of love story.

Music and language have long been connected for Kingsolver. In writing, she says she always thinks about the aspects of language that we describe in musical terms: cadence, pitch, intonation, rhythm — “all of those things make a sentence what it is.” She says she likes to write a novel as if every line contained its own music, its own poetry. “So bringing that kind of musical linguistic sensibility to writing about music was a marvel.” Livia has been in love with classical music her whole life, and Kingsolver says she loved expressing what music does for the character and how she uses it to process her emotions. 

While Kingsolver considers herself a literary writer, she says she doesn’t think of herself as highbrow. She wants her readers to understand her. “I have a commitment to accessibility,” she explains. Because of her own background and upbringing in the rural South, she says she knows that some readers might feel like classical music is not for them or that they’re not allowed to like it. But Kingsolver believes that shouldn’t deter them from enjoying the book. “Literary fiction can take us into worlds that are completely unknown to us, and that’s part of the beauty of the thing.”

As both a musician and a daughter, Livia feels like she doesn’t belong. “I’m not a joiner,” she tells her lover early on in the book, and this trait etches her as a character both admirably authentic and often intensely lonely.

Forced to return home by complicated circumstances, Livia must reckon with finding herself and her place in the community of her youth. Kingsolver says she returns to this theme in every book, “that push and pull between establishing ourselves as individuals and acknowledging our debts to our community.” As a woman coming from a rural Appalachian culture, Kingsolver says she grew up steeped in the sense that “we are nothing without our people, and in fact, the tall weed gets cut. It’s immodest to project yourself as an individual. So that’s a theme that I love to interrogate.”

Not unlike in “Demon Copperhead,” Kingsolver pushes her protagonist in “Partita” to her breaking point — “all in service of the story,” she says. In the epigraph, Kingsolver quotes Toni Morrison: “Sometimes you don’t survive whole, you just survive in part. But the grandeur of life is that attempt.” Kingsolver says that’s the wisest thing she’s ever heard anyone say about life. “If I can show my readers how it is that people survive the worst that life can throw at them and put themselves back together in a hopeful way, then I hope I’ve given them a gift that will carry them through their own hard times.” 

“Partita” is a love story — “It’s a very sexy book,” Kingsolver gushes — but it’s also about how love can break us and what we make of the pieces. Livia is enamored with music, but she also falls in love with a man for the first time, and the novel examines the repercussions of falling so hard: the kind of relationship where, when it ends, the person doesn’t feel like they can ever love again. 

“I was thinking about the broken parts of life and how we put them back together,” Kingsolver says. “When I thought of the title ‘Partita,’ I knew it was perfect.” As the novel explains, a partita is a musical composition made of different parts, which, traditionally, were dances with contrasting rhythms and styles. Kingsolver constructed the novel as a partita and named the chapters after the dance movements. 

“The challenge for the musician in playing a partita,” she says, “is to make all of these parts connect and feel like something whole at the end. (And) that’s what the novel attempts to do.”