PartitaAudiobook

Barbara Kingsolver

One phone call, and forty years of the life that came before it

Livia Cable has settled into a marriage and a modest living in the farming country she grew up in and left once. Then a man she has not spoken to in decades calls, and the settled part of her life turns out to have been arranged around that silence rather than in spite of it.

The novel moves between the woman who takes the call and the girl she was under a different surname: a conservatory student cut off from her family, convinced of her own talent as a pianist and of very little else, in love with a man whose importance to her is matched by his capacity to damage her. Kingsolver builds the two timelines as movements rather than chapters, and the memories arrive the way music arrives, in refrains and returns, so that the question of whether Livia meets him again keeps being deferred by the question of what she actually lost.

This audio edition carries six performances recorded for it, works by Chopin, Ravel, Grieg, Satie and Bach played by Han Chen, and a supplementary PDF. It is read by Megan Tusing and runs fourteen hours and twenty-three minutes.

Audiobook review by Emma Lawson

★★★★★

Kingsolver on class, ambition and one long note held over four decades

Kingsolver has spent a career writing about people whose lives are shaped by where they started and what it cost to leave, and this novel puts the argument inside a single woman instead of a county. Livia is a narrator with something to protect, and the book's cleverness is that her forty-year silence about the piano reads as a betrayal of herself long before it reads as anything else, so the reunion from the past is never just an old lover turning up. Megan Tusing keeps the older Livia dry and the younger one unguarded, which is exactly the difference the structure needs.

The audio production does something I have not heard done this well before. Six classical recordings made for the book by the pianist Han Chen are woven into the narration, and because the novel is organised around pieces rather than plot points, they land where the prose says they land. The Chopin and Ravel in particular are doing real narrative work, not serving as background, and there is a supplementary PDF for anyone who wants to follow the scores. If you have ever wondered why a novel about a pianist should be an audiobook at all, this is the answer.

The writing on class is the sharpest thing in it. Kingsolver is careful about what an artist from a poor family gives up in order to be taken seriously, and the conservatory sections carry an accurate chill about the economics of talent: auditions, borrowed clothes, the arithmetic of who can afford to fail. The book is unsentimental about ambition, and it is unsentimental about the man who encouraged Livia's, which is what allows the ending to work as well as it does. Several listeners describe the relationship as recognisable enough to be uncomfortable, and I would agree.

The reservation is the opening, and it is the one thing to know before you start. One listener puts it as losing half a star for the first quarter being rather slow, and that is generous to the pace: the farm-country present is deliberately muted, and if you need the past timeline to arrive before you are convinced to keep going, you will be waiting. There is a second, related complaint about the conservatory Livia herself, who is young and self-absorbed and, for one reviewer, agonising to spend those middle chapters with. I would defend it as the point, a woman who has not yet become the person the book is about, but the reaction is real and it is not rare. A listener with no musical background should also know that the vocabulary is used without translation, which the recordings partly solve and partly do not.

For anyone who liked The Things We Never Say, this is a similar appetite, a quiet novel about a life reconsidered, and East of Eden is the American family epic to go to next if this one leaves you wanting more of the same century. Fourteen hours, and worth clearing a couple of evenings for.

Barbara Kingsolver Partita literary fiction classical music Han Chen Megan Tusing

Partita is a novel by Barbara Kingsolver about a pianist who gave up the piano, and about the telephone call, decades later, that makes her account for why. This is the unabridged audio edition, running 14 hrs and 23 mins and narrated by Megan Tusing, with six classical works recorded for the production by the pianist Han Chen and a supplementary PDF included. It was released on October 6, 2026.

The structure alternates between Livia's present life in the farm country she grew up in and the conservatory years when she was someone else entirely, and it is the kind of novel that benefits from being heard in long sittings, since the two timelines echo each other more than they chop into one another.

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