2025 Books
December is always the month when writers are asked about their most memorable books of the year, so it’s as good a time as any to name a few. The first on my list is Barbara Kingsolver’s novel Demon Copperhead.
I have been a fan of Kingsolver’s work ever since I read her 2012 novel Flight Behavior, which struck me as a masterful demonstration of how realist fiction can contend with the multiple planetary crises that are now unfolding around us. It addresses some of the harshest realities of our time - biodiversity loss, species extinctions and climate change - but it also provides all the rewards of a good novel: a gripping narrative, stylistic virtuosity, interesting relationships, insights into characters, and so on.
Ten years later Kingsolver published another much-acclaimed novel: Demon Copperhead, which is set against the backdrop of another, equally devastating crisis: the opioid epidemic in Appalachia. In the year of its publication, 2022, I was writing the final chapters of Smoke and Ashes, my non-fictional account of the history of opium and opioids. My book is focused mainly on the British Empire’s enormously lucrative opium-producing operations in India, and the disastrous consequences this trade had for China, Southeast Asia, and indeed India itself. However, in the book’s penultimate chapter, the narrative circles back to the 21st century opioid crisis that has devastated large parts of the United States, most notably Appalachia.
It was precisely this part of the book that I was researching in 2022, when Demon Copperhead was published so I was then deeply immersed in the literature on the Oxycontin epidemic. Many journalists, historians and memoirists - among them Chris McGreal, Barry Meier, Ryan Hampton, Beth Macy and Patrick Radden Keefe, to name just a few - have written very powerful and well-researched accounts of the crisis. Yet, the overall effect is at once so enraging and depressing, that it takes some time to recover from a deep immersion in the subject.
So it was not until the Fall of 2025 that I finally got around to reading Kingsolver’s novel, and it was well worth the wait: Demon Copperhead is a haunting, moving, and at times heart-breaking story. The book is written in the form of a ‘recovery journal’ narrated by its eponymous protagonist, Demon (Damon) Copperhead, a red-headed orphan who bounces from foster home to foster home before a short-lived rise to prominence as a high-school athlete. In his own words: ‘I came from a junkie mom and foster care, briefly a star, to some degree famous because of all that. Quick to burn out, right on schedule.’
There is a certain inevitability in Demon’s descent into opioid addiction. He notes at one point: ‘I don’t know a single person my age that’s not taking pills.’ Demon’s nightmarish descent into addiction is charted in unsparing detail in the novel. But one of the great rewards of reading Kingsolver is that there is always a reassuring sense of being in the hands of a writer who is deeply kind - and so she is once again with her Demon. I will leave it at that for fear of giving too much away.