Barbara Kingsolver’s bestselling novels tackle political and social issues and win prizes, among them the Pulitzer and Women’s Prize for Fiction (twice). Subjects she has covered include colonialism; environmental issues (preserving ecosystems and flora and fauna, and punishing polluting companies); the validity of extended family approaches to child-rearing in Cherokee Nation communities; the art of Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera and their friendship with Trotsky; and the McCarthy era and the House UnAmerican Activities Committee. She has also explored parallels between 19th-century struggles for rationalism in the form of Darwinism and economic hardships under despotic leaders and their echo in today’s US; the desolation wrought by the loss of industries such as timber and coal, and the subsequent vulnerability of deracinated youngsters to opiates sold as safe.

Sometimes her liberal sensibilities collide with her wish to defend her Appalachian community, held back by economic hardship and traditional farming methods practised for generations despite making a loss. In her novel Demon Copperhead, ‘Demon’ chides those who label such people ‘deplorables’ – but Kingsolver has said that she loves Hillary Clinton and thinks her ‘basket of deplorables’ comment about half of Donald Trump’s supporters was ‘taken out of context’.

Partita concentrates on social and family issues – class impacting on confidence, and the corrosion of self-esteem by an abusive parent. It also has a strong feminist message. In the farming background from which the protagonist Livia Cable comes, women never have careers outside the community. The novel is also a gorgeous exploration of classical music. Livia, an unusually talented pianist, wins a scholarship to a prestigious music school. Needing to be better than others to overcome snobbish prejudice, she works her fingers almost literally to the bone. But then distraction arrives.

Kingsolver astutely describes the irony of rich kids dressing like the homeless while members of Livia’s grindingly poor community take pride in looking smart; the mistaking of sexual intimacy for love; and the emptiness of heartbreak. The prose is stuffed with imaginative similes and metaphors. Occasionally some are strained (‘We honoured our dead attachment like a corpse between us’) or too obvious: Livia burning everything in her mother’s house is clearly an ablation of past regrets. But this is an enthralling novel, full of pathos, wisdom and humour.