Partita

Partita (2026) is a literary novel by Barbara Kingsolver, the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Demon Copperhead. Taking its structure from the musical form of a partita—a suite of distinct movements—the novel uses chapter titles like “Prelude,” “Fugue,” and “Sarabande” to frame its narrative. The story is narrated by Livia Cable, a piano teacher in rural Tennessee whose quiet life is disrupted when a man from her distant past, Sigurd, calls unexpectedly. The call forces Livia to revisit her memories of 1989, when she was a brilliant music student whose passionate affair with Sigurd, a charismatic socialist organizer, ended her dream of becoming a concert pianist. Alternating between her present-day turmoil and these powerful flashbacks, the novel explores how youthful choices and unresolved trauma reverberate through a lifetime.

Drawing on Kingsolver’s own background as a classical piano student, Partita is set against the backdrop of real-world 1980s campus activism, including the anti-apartheid divestment movement and the Socialist Workers Party’s “turn to industry.” The novel examines themes such as The Inevitability of Loss, questioning the destructive price the body pays for art or ideology. It also examines The Importance of Rethinking the Past and the role of Art as Salvation, as Livia reconstructs a meaningful life through teaching and community. Upon its release, Partita was selected as a Read With Jenna Book Club Pick.

This guide refers to the 2026 first edition published by Harper.

Content Warning: The source text and this guide contain depictions of death by suicide, physical abuse, emotional abuse, pregnancy loss or termination, sexual content, cursing, and illness or death.

Plot Summary

Livia Cable, a piano teacher in rural Tennessee, finds her quiet life upended by a phone call from Sigurd, a lover from her distant past. Now in his fifties and facing a serious illness, Sigurd is coming to nearby Nashville for a medical consultation and wants to see her. The call plunges Livia into the past, forcing her to confront her painful childhood memories—including her mother’s abuse and her brother’s suicide—and the chain of traumatic events that ended her dreams of being a concert pianist and led to her current life with her kind, steady, hard-working husband, Charlie. The narrative alternates between Livia’s present-day turmoil as she decides whether to meet Sigurd and a series of extended flashbacks to her college years in 1989. As a brilliant but insecure music student, Livia is in a comfortable relationship with fellow musician Jon Link when she meets Sigurd, a charismatic socialist organizer 10 years her senior. She feels an instant, powerful connection to him, and they quickly begin a passionate affair that consumes her, with their passion initially mirrored in Livia’s intense personal quest to master Maurice Ravel’s famously difficult piano suite Gaspard de la nuit. After successfully performing the piece for an academic jury, she begins to think of nothing but Sigurd, neglecting her music and pulling away from Jon Link, with whom she still technically lives.

Livia’s idyllic summer with Sigurd comes to a sudden end when his political party requires all its members to relocate to industrial centers to organize workers. Sigurd is assigned to the railroad union in Phoenix, Arizona. He wants Livia to come with him, but she feels he doesn’t respect her devotion to music, seeing it as less important than his revolutionary work. After a series of painful arguments, Livia refuses to go, and Sigurd leaves. Devastated and in financial trouble, as she has been informally living with Sigurd and now has nowhere to go, Livia takes a job as a line cook at a local diner, Gorgo’s, whose Italian immigrant owner, Amadeo, has been a champion of Livia’s music since she entered the college. One night, when Amadeo is not present, Livia’s right hand is catastrophically crushed in an industrial dough roller. The injury is career-ending, requiring extensive surgery with pins and grafts that leave her hand permanently damaged. While recovering, she discovers she is pregnant with Sigurd’s child. The pain and heavy medication she has been under have masked the symptoms of pregnancy, and she is shocked to learn that she has already been pregnant for five months without realizing. Desperate, she tries to get an abortion, but she is first misled by an anti-abortion protestor posing as a clinic worker, then thwarted when the clinic is closed by a bomb threat. By the time she understands her options, she is too far along in her pregnancy for a simple, outpatient procedure. Recent legislative changes in Indiana mean that the type of abortion she needs will now have to take place in a hospital, drastically increasing the cost.

Out of options, Livia writes to Sigurd in Phoenix, asking for money for the more expensive hospital procedure. Unbeknownst to her, Sigurd has been transferred to Los Angeles, and three weeks pass before his Phoenix associates forward Livia’s letter to him. When he calls, he is shocked and initially struggles to believe what Livia tells him. He cannot leave his new railroad job but promises to send bus fare for her to come to Phoenix, where his party members will help arrange either an abortion or an adoption. Feeling completely abandoned, Livia tells him she never wants to see him again and hangs up. Days later, she experiences a violent placental abruption. She hemorrhages severely, loses the nonviable fetus, and nearly dies before an emergency hysterectomy saves her life. Facing a long and precarious physical recovery, she is forced to withdraw from school and has no choice but to call home. Charlie Cable, her quiet neighbor, drives to Bloomington to bring her back to her family’s farm, where her father is now dying of cancer. Over the following months, as she slowly recovers, Livia and Charlie form a gentle, supportive bond, which eventually leads to marriage and a quiet life running the dairy farm she inherits. Eventually, she begins to play piano again, though she laments that she will never again be able to play technically demanding pieces like Gaspard de la nuit. She builds a rewarding career giving lessons to local people, sharing the creative joy that has been so vital to her own identity.

In the present, as Livia awaits Sigurd’s follow-up call, she undertakes the painful task of cleaning out her recently deceased mother’s house. Her abusive mother had a hoarding disorder, and the house is stuffed with objects, most of which appear to have no significance, though the process of clearing out these objects also unearths buried family secrets. She discovers a box of her mother’s old recital programs, revealing that her mother, who always scorned Livia’s musical ambitions, once had a vivid passion for singing that she pursued in Nashville before her marriage. More devastatingly, Livia finds a hidden manila envelope containing two suicide notes from her older brother, Cyrus, who died by stepping in front of a train when he was 17 and Livia was 11. The note intended for Livia, which her mother hid for decades, reveals that Cyrus was in love with a boy, Marshall Stilwell, and died by suicide in despair after they were forcibly separated. This revelation reorients Livia’s understanding of her family, her mother’s cruelty, and her own lifelong grief.

When Sigurd calls back, Livia agrees to see him but orchestrates the meeting on her own terms. She arranges a recital for her students at the small church where she first learned to play, creating a public testament to the life she has built. 

Before Sigurd arrives, Livia cathartically burns the remnants of her family’s painful past on a large bonfire outside her mother’s house, with Charlie at her side. Before the fire goes out, an ember catches on the roof of the house’s porch, and neighbors must rush over to help put out the fire before the house—the sale of which will fund Charlie and Livia’s retirement—is destroyed. 

When Sigurd arrives the day after the fire, Livia is struck by how much he has aged; he is no longer the beautiful man of her memory but someone worn down by his own disappointments. During the chaotic and joyful recital, her most talented student, a young boy named Deronne, plays “Le Gibet,” the somber middle movement of Gaspard de la nuit. Livia watches Sigurd for a sign of recognition, but he shows none. The music that has haunted her for nearly 30 years means nothing to him. In that instant, the past loses its power over her. The recital becomes a celebration of Livia’s community. Her students, from young children to adults, play a mix of classical pieces, country standards, and even a rock-and-roll song they wrote themselves. The event is a loving, chaotic, and authentic reflection of her life’s work. She has confronted the ghosts of her past and found she is not broken, but whole in the life she has chosen, holding the key to the sanctuary she made for herself.