Book Club Guide

Demon Copperhead

by Barbara Kingsolver · 2022 · Literary Fiction

Key themes

Appalachian poverty and what was done to it by deindustrialisation and opioids
The foster care system and its specific failures
A child's will to survive a world that has decided not to care for him

About this book

Damon Fields — nicknamed Demon Copperhead for his copper hair and his will — grows up in rural Appalachian Virginia in the opioid epidemic, ageing out of foster care into addiction, loss and an attempt to survive a world that has been systematically stripped of its economic future. Kingsolver's Pulitzer Prize-winning retelling of David Copperfield is the most urgent American novel about the opioid crisis.

Published in 2022, Demon Copperhead won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction jointly with Trust by Hernan Diaz. Kingsolver spent years in Appalachian communities researching the opioid epidemic before writing it.

Discussion questions

The novel retells David Copperfield. How close does Kingsolver stay to Dickens — and what does the updating of this specific novel to the opioid crisis achieve?
Demon's voice is one of the great achievements of the novel — funny, enraged, observant. How does Kingsolver develop it — and how does its energy sustain a very long book?
The pharmaceutical companies and their relationship to Appalachian poverty are the novel's structural villains. How does Kingsolver show systemic exploitation without reducing the characters to victims?
The novel won the Pulitzer Prize. What does it do that earns this recognition — and what does it say about what literature is supposed to be for?
Kingsolver is not from Appalachia. How does she navigate the ethics of writing a first-person novel in the voice of a community she is not from?