Demon Copperhead

Demon Copperhead is a 2022 novel by Barbara Kingsolver. It was a co-recipient of the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and won the 2023 Women's Prize for Fiction. Kingsolver was inspired by Charles Dickens's David Copperfield, and as with that novel, hers is about a boy who experiences poverty, though it is set in Appalachia and addresses contemporary issues.

The book touches on social and economic stratification in Appalachia, child poverty in rural America and drug addiction, with attention to the opioid crisis. Damon Fields is born in Lee County in the Appalachian Mountains of Virginia to a single teenage mother in a trailer home, and he is nicknamed Demon Copperhead for his red hair, dark skin and light eyes, inherited from his Melungeon father, who drowned.

The narration is first person and unsparing. Following Dickens means the book is structured as an upbringing rather than as an episode, and the reader's attention is held by the sequence of institutions and adults that the narrator passes through rather than by a single plot to be resolved. The Dickens parallel is structural rather than decorative, because both books follow a child through a series of households and institutions without offering him an early way out.