Pulitzer Prize-winning author Barbara Kingsolver will appear at Tarrytown Music Hall on Wednesday, October 7 to discuss her new novel, Partita, her first novel since the Pulitzer Prize-winning Demon Copperhead.
Presented by Live Talks NY, the event will celebrate the publication of PARTITA, a deeply moving, unforgettable novel about art, music, class, memory, and the life-altering power of love—a book Kingsolver says she has been waiting her whole life to write.
All tickets include a copy of Partita. Tickets are available here: https://tickets.tarrytownmusichall.org/eventperformances.asp?evt=3249
EVENT DETAILS
Barbara Kingsolver discusses Partita
Wednesday, October 7
Tarrytown Music Hall
13 Main Street
Tarrytown
In Partita, 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 her promise as an extraordinary pianist. His request to see her again stirs up ghosts she has 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, memories of childhood loss, abandonment, passion, and a perilous attachment to a man who broke her belief in love and ruptured the course of her life.
Told in movements that mirror a Bach partita, Kingsolver’s new novel reflects on class barriers, the risks of ambition, and the timeless, life-changing power of art. The novel unfolds with the precision and emotional power of music itself: each section building on the last, each theme returning transformed.
Kingsolver says of the novel:
“All my life, I’ve loved both language and music in a hungry, passionate way that happily entwines them in my brain… Finally, now, it strikes me as a worthy project to ask who made these rules, that small-town fiddlers and country music fans don’t feel welcome in a symphony hall, and vice versa? Why is our culture of arts divided this way, and what are the costs to all of us? I found it rich territory for fiction.”
