Partita Summary

Partita by Barbara Kingsolver was published in October 2026, when it was announced as a Read With Jenna Book Club pick. It follows her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, Demon Copperhead, and is Kingsolver’s 10th work of fiction. I made a summary of Partita to remind you of the plot, characters, and important moments in the book.

Partita is the story of Livia, a pianist in Tennessee, told in a dual-timeline narrative. In the present day, she lives on a dairy farm with her husband, while in her former life she was a musical talent at school, aiming to become a concert pianist. After receiving a call from her college boyfriend, the past and present storylines collide as she reckons with the what-ifs of life.

This Partita summary is detailed and will contain spoilers. If you are looking to read Partita for your book club, I also have a list of Partita book club questions.

Before you read the summary, please be aware that in addition to spoilers, there may be some content that is triggering. These include, but are not limited to, suicide, miscarriage, and discussion of abortion.

Quick Summary of Partita

Livia, a farmer’s wife, receives a call from her college love, Sigurd, asking if he can visit her. She asks for a week to decide if she wants to see him. Each morning of the week (the Prelude chapters), she examines her feelings about the past as she works to clean out her recently deceased mother’s home, a big job because she was a hoarder. While uncovering items in her mother’s home, she learns why her brother committed suicide years ago and reckons with her relationship with her parents, her love for her husband, Charlie, and her mixed feelings about her past with Sigurd.

Between each of those chapters, Livia remembers her time in college studying to be a concert pianist. It’s here that she had a relationship with Sigurd, leaving her former boyfriend, Jon Link, to get swept into the whirlwind of passionate love with him. Sigurd works for The Party, and is eventually relocated to Arizona leaving a devastated Livia behind.

Unable to make rent, she works at a local diner when she gets distracted while cleaning a pizza machine and ends up with her hand flattened between two dough plates. She’s rushed to the hospital for surgery to save her hand, but she’ll never be able to play the piano professionally. Distracted by the pain meds and surgery, a routine test shows she’s 19 weeks pregnant. Before she can have an abortion, she has a placental abruption, leading to a hysterectomy and ultimately sending her back to her family farm.

She arrives to find her father dying and her mother’s hoarding tendency out of hand. When her father leaves her the farm, she hires Charlie to help her run it. The two eventually marry, and she becomes a piano teacher. Sigurd comes to visit, and she shows off her students while sitting between the two men she loved.

Partita Summary

Overture – a piece of music that opens for a large musical production

In the opening pages, Livia is pondering how her brother Cyrus was able to commit suicide by jumping in front of a train because it goes against every human instinct to protect oneself. She recalls being haunted by his absence, explaining that his death broke her parents, but she went on trying to be a child, scarred forever by what happened when she was 11.

Prelude I – short piece of music, typically an introduction

When Sigurd calls Livia seemingly out of the blue, she is relieved that she isn’t with her husband, Charlie. After twenty years of not speaking, her reckoning is coming because he wants to see her. She tells him she needs time to consider his request, and he agrees to call back on the weekend. She plays the piano late at night while her farmer husband sleeps and her dog, Gaz, lies nearby.

She stops after her hand hurts, rubbing at the old injury and thinking of the steel pins – an injury Sigurd doesn’t know he’s responsible for. Livia takes Gaz out and considers if she’s destined to become her mother, despite not being able to be a mother herself. Her mother gave up when she lost Cy at 30, but Livia was younger still when she lost everything.

Allemande – opening movement of a traditional Baroque dance suite

Livia sees Sigurd for the first time and feels instant recognition. It’s 1989, and she’s living on her college campus with her boyfriend, Jon Link. Livia left her small town against her mom’s wishes on a full scholarship to study classical music. She’s thrifty and works hard, as does Jon, so they hatch a plan to marry and move into married student housing. She befriends Jon’s friends, Bassoon and Percussion, and they all slot together perfectly.

In her third year, she sees and then meets Sigurd, who is selling a paper on communist ideals. She approaches him, drawn to his looks or confidence, and they strike up a conversation about classical music, specifically Holst’s Planets Suite. He asks her to lunch, and they go to a diner – the Greasy Spoon – together to talk further, the same diner she used to work at. They see Amadeo, and Livia introduces him to Sigurd.

She talks about how her choice to go to college upset her mom. Then, when she started to study performance art, she was hard on herself. He offers her a Marxist analysis of her life. He tries to convince her that she’s being taught to underestimate her value, that workers are always undermining their value.

Sigurd is 26, trained as a welder, and tried community college before his current job selling The Militant. Livia is wildly attracted to him because he was just himself. She talks about Jon Link as her roommate, as opposed to the man she’s been considering marrying, joking about how he always says both names as if they need each other to stand up.

She finds out he’s the youngest of 9, which she doesn’t judge, as she lived on a dairy and tobacco farm in Tennessee, where large families are expected. She started playing piano at 6, replacing the church pianist at 9, instead of being praised for her talent, her peers made fun of her.

Sigurd seems to know a lot about history; he’s a typesetter working at a print shop nearby. He was trying to get people to unionize, but they didn’t want to ruffle feathers and risk getting replaced by machines. Livia jokingly asked was going to be taken into his cult, he deflated. She decided to take off her sweater to reveal herself more in the hopes of resparking their connection. He told her a little about the Party, paid for her lunch, and gave her the magazine before they went their seperate ways.

With one meeting, Livia falls hard and begins picking fights with Jon Link, now unhappy with her life despite talking about marriage so recently. When he finds out he’s headed to Munich for the summer, he pushes for a quiet, quick wedding but gets upset when she confesses she hasn’t told her parents about their plans.

Livia started to realize how different they were. Jon came from a well-to-do family in Boston, while she came from a family of farmers in Tennessee. Where she was an odd duck for attending college, he was expected to, coming from three generations of college graduates. Livia felt that Jon’s family would look down on hers; they fought terribly and then not at all, with Jon headed to Munich and her left to sort out what had happened to her plans.

Livia heads to a Party meeting in the hopes of seeing Sigurd, but leaves when she realizes he isn’t there. She heads to a practice room and plays Chopin’s Prelude Opus 28, No 15, to express her pain, feeling as brokenhearted as Chopin was when he wrote it.

Prelude II

Tuesday is the second day after Sigurd’s call, and Livia can’t sleep so she goes to her deceased mother’s house. Her mother was a hoarder, and while Livia judged her when she was younger, she understands now that it was a disease. She’s going to clean the house as a punishment to herself. Gaz doesn’t like the house any more than she does.

Mickie, Charlie’s sister, sometimes comes over with her kids to help Livia clean out the house and her kids play among the piles of trash and detritus. 

When Livia talks to Mickie, she tells her about finding the old photos of military men, which Mickey points out is because of Cyrus; her parents wanted him to enlist after all. But Cy couldn’t even watch a war movie on TV. 

Livia is upset that she never had a resolution with her mother, and now she can’t because her mother died over the summer. Mickie is complaining about her daughter’s choice to get a tattoo, and comments that it’s not chemically possible for mothers to kill their kids. Livia says I wouldn’t know, but she’s hiding the truth that she did carry a child once before.

Livia thanks back to the last time. She really talked to her mother before Easter, when she was in college. Her mother was giving her a hard time for coming home, picking apart her life at school, while trying to guilt her into coming home for the holiday. Livia didn’t know then that her dad had just been diagnosed with cancer, and her mother was scared. “If you loved your family, you’d be .” Upset with the phone call, she doesn’t call her mother again for months.

Livia was not particularly close to her dad, but she knew he loved her. He even named his barn CyLee Dairy.

She thinks about how hard it was to assimilate into college, often mispronouncing words or feeling out of place, but when she showed off her talent, she began to be accepted into the music community.

Toccata – fast piece of music, usually breaks from traditional music structure

Jon Link Olivia, I have stopped fighting, but they’re not really talking to each other either. He was preparing for his summer in Munich; she was preparing Ravel’s Gaspard de la nuit – a challenging piece that is particularly hard to play for the spring recital.

One day on her way to practice, she came across a quartet of black women, singing under a free South Africa banner. When a speaker got up, she realized it was the event she learned about when she went to the Party meeting – she looked around and saw Sigurd working on the sound equipment. She walks up and gives him her number.

He calls and invites her to lunch back at the diner. He asks her how she came to study music. She explains the series of piano teachers, how difficult it was to get to her music lessons when her mom wouldn’t drive her, and eventually, her brother’s death. 

It didn’t make sense to her, his suicide. Earlier that day he had said he come to her asking for secret piano lessons – he was musical like her too, and wanted to be able to play. Cyrus was a handsome boy, but he was crushed under the weight of expectation. The town wanted him to play basketball and date; he felt they judged a book by its cover without reading the book.

After her story, which was given in a cemetery, Livia and Sigurd kiss for the first time.

Prelude III

It’s Wednesday, and Livia still can’t figure out what to do about Sigurd. He’s sick and headed to Vanderbilt to find out if he can get treatment for his diagnosis. He wants to come and see her while he’s in town. He saw her mother’s obituary and was thinking of her, which Livia knew meant he had been searching her name online.

Wednesdays are usually her day free from working as a local pianist and instructor, but since June, she’s been spending her Wednesdays cleaning out her mother’s house to get it ready to sell. It was there that she came across a collection of all her recital programs, including ones her mother couldn’t possibly have gone to. Her shock causes Gaz to get distressed, but she calms him and thinks back on her past.

She sees the program for her performance at the Knoxville Symphony Orchestra and recalls the massive fight she and he mom had over the dress. Livia needed formal wear for the performance, so they went to a fancy store. Her mother wouldn’t pay for the $100 dress saying instead “no point in buying the uniform till you know you’ve got the job.” Livia confidently tells her she’s going to win and her mom almost slaps her before remembering herself.

Livia bought the dress herself and did win the performance; she came home from it to a dark, sleeping house. She was hurt that she wasn’t supported by her mother, but her mother had always been hands-off when it came to her music, so she wasn’t surprised.

Charlie stops by with lunch. Livia was just rounding up old dressmaking patterns, including one for a formal gown, some of which could be worth a lot if she sold them. She found loads of records too, and recalls seeing her mother buy them but never hearing her play them. She also remembers Cy getting in trouble for touching them.

Charlie talks about his day, and the subject of his shoes comes up – he has a prosthetic leg. He lost his leg when his grandma ran him over with a ride-on lawn mower. He grew up on crutches and didn’t have the money or medical access in his rural community to get a prosthetic until he was older.

Charlie spots duplicates of appliances they have at home and Livia explains she’s found duplicates of every gift her mom has ever given, unopened, all over the house. She bought two of every gift, keeping one.

Livia’s theory is that she couldn’t stand to part with anything, even a gift. Charlie’s theory is that she wanted to keep the feeling of giving around in her heart. Livia thinks about what a grace-filled, charitable man her husband is, but she still can’t stop thinking of Sigurd.

Sarabande – slow, heavy, and serious piece from a musical suite

Livia and Sigurd made out in the cemetery before breaking apart, making plans to see each other once she was done practicing for her performance. It’s an incredibly important performance that will help her get job recommendations as well as count toward her grade. Because her piece is so technically difficult, she needs to practice.

In the music annex, Livia loves to play on a few old Steinways. While the cemetery makeout happened on Tuesday, she didn’t want to see Sigurd until Saturday so she could practice. At midnight on Friday, after she had been practicing for three hours, Sigurd showed up to watch her. She explains how sensual the piece is and plays it for him while he performs a sex act on her.

After the practice room, she barely showed up for the rest of her classes. Her notoriously tough teacher smiled at her performance; she bade Jon Link farewell as he left for the summer, and she began her relationship with Sigurd in earnest despite never having a formal break-up with Jon Link.

She seems so cavalier in her dismissal of her relationship with Jon. Livia moves into Sigurd’s apartment, only to realize his life revolves around the Party. Sigurd never saw her performances, but she played for him at home.

His dad was in the military, as were his older brothers. His sisters went into service as nurses, teachers, and even a nun. He nicknamed Livia “Planets” and she told him the realities of living on a farm. Her dad had a close relationship with their dog, Dolly, who was a stray that he rescued. He wasn’t permitted to have a close relationship with Livia for fear of her mother being angry about it.

Then Livia tells Sigurd what a partita is – a composition made of a lot of parts with different paces and moods. A partita often comprises “a prelude, a thrilling allemande, maybe a slow, sexy sarabande – the contrast is the point.” Sigurd asks if she’s happy when she’s playing, and she isn’t happy so much as she likes the feeling of disappearing into the music.

Livia realizes she hasn’t had the compulsion to go into complete absorption lately, skipping practices and not being as dedicated an accompanist. Livia feels that making love to Sigurd was like making music.

That summer, Livia works as an accompanist for Herr Doctor Brockhaus, a finicky singer from Germany, because she’s one of the best students and is capable of playing Schubert. After the big performance, her appearance for other musical moments begins to slip, which Sigurd thinks is normal because she’s exhausted from her big piece in the spring, but she feels broken. She felt scared and unsure of where her life is going.

Sigurd makes her go to her job, possibly because he thinks she needs the money. She does because she’ll do whatever he asks.

Sigurd tries to explain his theories to her about why man should not have possession of an unfair amount of land, while Livia explains that in her family the oldest brother gets the farm and the other siblings go off to work, and in the case of her uncles, they were better off for it. Her father worked hard his entire life without ever being able to stop. Sigurd says the banks own it all, and her personal property is an illusion.

As he continues to attack farm life, Livia pushes back lightly, and he seems to correct himself. Livia realizes this is why she can’t buy into Party life; her people were never going to take over anything. Sigurd apologizes, listening to her thoughtfully, and she begins to think about bringing him home to meet her parents.

Prelude IV

On Thursday, Livia wakes up deciding she will not be seeing Sigurd. She’s so distracted she almost hits a deer on her way to give lessons at the high school. She teaches Edwina, Deronne, and a cast of others, recalling when she tried to teach her brother to play. After school, she walks the track with Mickie.

On this particular day, Mickie starts talking about her daughter, Betts, and how she wants to be queer. Livia asks if she is or wants to be, and Mickie says she’s working it out. Livia shares about their shared students, Bella, Cleo, and Rose, and the trouble they are giving her. Mickie confides that they will probably be cutting back on AP English classes at the school because the school board can’t justify it, she also says her son, Ethan, doesn’t want to go to college because it’s a waste of time and money.

They discuss what it was like when they went to college; Mickie confessed that her husband (boyfriend at the time) thought she would run away with someone fancier, while Livia said her mother thought she would get too educated to attract a man. They discuss whether their music or literature studies were wasted, to which Mickie says, “The point of art is to help you like your life better.”

Livia briefly considers talking to Mickie about Sigurd, but changes her mind. The subject goes back to her mom’s home, and Livia talks about the letters she found from her mother to her grandmother. She also found an envelope labeled Cyrus with a letter inside that said ” Mom ” on the envelope.

Mickie tells Livia she needs to read all these letters. She wants Livia to understand her mother and hear what her brother had to say.

Fugue – starts as one “voice” as others chime in over the piece, making it feel like fleeing

Jon Link left enough money to cover 2/3 of the rent and the bills, and Livia had to make enough to cover the rest. While Livia is trying to figure out what to do to make rent, Sigurd announces that he’s moving to Arizona for the Party to work with the railroad union. They argued nonstop. He doesn’t ask her to come; she couldn’t anyway because, ever since Cy’s death, she can’t stand the railroad.

The ease with which he leaves her causes Livia to doubt herself and her chosen path. He thinks that her playing the piano is being the accompanist to someone else’s life. She can’t let music go.

She moves back to the apartment she shares with Jon Link. She’s so distraught that she gets fired as an accompanist for the choir. In need of rent, she heads to the diner to work for Amadeo. She’s working in the back of the house, chopping veggies, when she offers to clean the pizza kneader and has her hand sucked through the dough plates. 

As she’s about to be wheeled off to surgery, Amadeo arrives and advocates for a leading hand surgeon to come and operate. Bassoon arrived back from Munich while Livia was recovering; he had started a relationship with Percussion abroad. Bassoon moves into Livia and Jon Link’s old apartment and helps her recover. Before Jon Link comes back, Bassoon helps her move into a new apartment.

Amadeo had put down the rent for her, and his family came to help her unpack and share her first meal in her new place with her. Livia spent the next weeks in appointments and PT, trying to heal her hand with Ladawna, her physician’s assistant. She’s about to get her round of follow-up X-Rays when routine bloodwork shows she’s pregnant.

Prelude V

On Friday, Livia wakes up thinking about her hands and how grateful she is that Amadeo advocated to get a leading surgeon from U of Indianapolis to come in and operate on her. She still sends him a Christmas card each year despite not being in contact with anyone else from her past.

She decides to read the letters she found in her mother’s house, starting with her grandmother’s letters, which berated her mother, criticizing her appearance and choices. It’s then that she sees that her grandmother was writing to her mother in Nashville.

She tries to put the puzzle pieces together. She knows her mother met her father at a dance, and they married soon after. She keeps digging and finds more programs – from her mother’s performances. Her mother was a singer, first at school and then trying her hand as a talent in Nashville. How could her mother keep the secret that she loved music from her daughter?

She moves on to Cyrus’s note to his mother, which was among the clippings about Marshall Stilwell and others who were picked up by the police. Marshall later went to the military. She can’t figure out what they were in trouble for, but she knew her parents wanted Cy to go to the Marines.

Mickie calls on her lunch break, and Livia explains what she’s discovered so far. Mickie has compassion for Livia’s mom, saying it must have been hard to see her daughter succeed at a life she had wanted for herself.

Livia goes to open the letter from Cy to her mom, it explains that she can’t Cyrus can’t be made into something he’s not from his parents, and says Livia will understand because he wrote to her too. Unaware of the letter, Livia is frantic to find it. She does, and she reads it.

Cyrus was in love with Marshall and is heartbroken that he was taken from him. He feels like it’s worse than Marshall being dead. He compares Music for her to Marshall for him and says he’ll be heading to a place where he can be at peace.

Livia needs to walk and have a cry, so she tells her student she’ll be late as she and Gaz walk back to her home.

Pathétique – a piece that evokes tragic or deeply moving sentiments

Ladawna helps Livia process the news of her pregnancy. She gets an ultrasound and finds out she’s 19 weeks pregnant and didn’t know because the surgery, pain meds, and recovery were keeping her from gaining weight. Livia is not prepared to be pregnant and wants an abortion.

Her X-rays come back good, so he embarks on trying to get an abortion, but she’s met at the clinic by protestors who trick her into thinking she needs parental consent because she’s a few months shy of 21.

While thinking about her options, Livia gets a visit from Percussion and Bassoon, and it’s obvious to her now that the men are together. They tell her Jon Link is dating Stephania.

Back for an ortho appointment, Livia learns she’s off the school insurance. Livia talks to Ladawna, who explains how she’s been tricked, but now the clinic is closed because of a threat to the building. When she can get through for an intake over the phone, she learns she needs to head to the hospital for an abortion at this late stage; it can’t be done in the clinic anymore.

Livia writes to Sigurd explaining the situation because she needs money for the abortion. The letter goes to Phoenix, but then she gets a call from L.A., his new post. He was told he had to call her but didn’t know why. She explains about the pregnancy and her lack of funds. He can send her to Phoenix, where his Party will help her; he will send her bus fare and money to take care of it in Arizona. She says she never wants to talk to him again, without even mentioning her hand.

She began to bleed, and it didn’t stop. She doesn’t remember much, but she walked to the hospital, leaving a trail of blood in her wake. She was wheeled right into surgery, where it was discovered that she had a placental abruption and needed a hysterectomy to stop the bleeding. For five days, she was in the hospital as Jane Doe, until she was lucid enough to correct them.

Bassoon came quickly with a mutual friend, Ina. There was so much blood in her apartment that they thought she had been murdered, and the hospital wouldn’t release any information about her.

Livia is discharged but couldn’t call Amadeo without explaining the pregnancy, and she didn’t want to. Bassoon has to push her to her apartment in a wheelchair. When she was finally alone, she wept for all she lost including the prospect of future children.

She sorts her mail and sees the bus money from Sigurd; she sends it back unopened. Then she calls home. Instead of her mother answering, Faye Cable picks up the phone, saying she’s been helping her mom. Livia is unaware of what is happening, and Faye says it isn’t her place, but she arranges for Charlie to drive up and bring Livia and her things home.

Prelude VI

On Saturday, Livia shows up at her mom’s house to continue cleaning it out and think more about what to do about Sigurd and have it out with Cyrus. She’s been having a one-way conversation with him for years and needs to discuss his suicide note. She feels him on the roof, where they used to meet as children. Gaz is upset because he can’t join her on the roof.

She realizes that the night he died, she overheard and went to sleep in his room, and that when her mom went to look for her in the morning, she saw the note and took it. Livia keeps thinking the same thing: “How could you leave me? Why am I leavable?”

Her phone rings, and she’s startled to hear Sigurd call her Planets on the other end of the line. She thought he was calling her back on Saturday. She asks if this is his idea of friendship, calling every two decades. He explains he knew she was mad about the pregnancy and the end of their relationship, so he wanted to give her time to cool off.

His medical appointment went ok; they caught up on the superficial things. He doesn’t have a wife or kids, though he was married at one point to a fellow Party member. He still lives in California. He says he left because he was scared and wanted to get out of her way; he’s been looking for her name for 20 years, waiting to find out about her becoming a famous pianist. Livia explains she’s married and is a piano teacher on a farm to a boy she’s been friends with since childhood.

Sigurd explains that his medical condition is treatable but not curable, but that he will live a long time; he also says he’s disappointed. He’s not suicidal, but he’s daunted by going back to his dragging life. He was sure of his convictions but isn’t anymore. He thinks the youth of today are wrong; rather than hating the men getting rich off their labor, they want to be those men.

Sigurd took a buyout to leave the railroad, and then he went to work for a nonprofit in San Jose that helps people in minimum-wage jobs with secure housing. The conversation circles back to the pregnancy; Livia says she needs to go soon to teach the children piano. Sigurd says she’s living in fantasyland, and she sets him straight on the realities of farm life – no healthcare, paying for piano lessons with eggs, prepping for winter, etc.

It’s then she tells him that she’s not a concert pianist because of what happened to her hand. He is shocked. He asks why she never told him. She asks what he would have done. He only offered her bus fare to Phoenix. He had wanted to chat and put their grievances in the past, but he wasn’t expecting news about her hand.

She says she can just tell him how she thinks of him and save him the drive. 20-year-old Livia hated him and wanted him to burn in hell. Older Livia wishes she had never met him because her life would have been entirely different. He says there is more he wants to talk about and more he needs to hear.

Livia tells him to come Monday afternoon or evening, and she will let him stay at her house for the night. She compares them to The Gift of the Magi, and they decide to see each other in two days.

Da Capo – a piece that returns to the beginning

Livia is picked up by Charlie, who carries her into his back seat, packs her up, and drives her home. She comes back to find her father dying of lung cancer, something she didn’t know about because she had stopped talking to her mother before Easter. She can’t walk upstairs, so they convalesce in the den together, her healing and him dying.

Faye Cable is there with her mother to help care for them. Her father’s dog Dolly never leaves his side. It’s during this time that Livia’s friendship with Mickie begins in earnest, while Charlie does all the dairy farm chores without complaining. Her dad couldn’t get expensive treatments because farmers can’t afford to insure themselves, only their animals. Meanwhile, Ladawna got Livia’s hospital bills taken care of by yelling at the registrar that they never should have kicked a student of health insurance midterm.

Every morning, Charlie would come in to talk shop with Livia’s dad, and it was the most her dad spoke all day. Charlie was just coming into his own with his new prosthetic. Two days before Christmas, Dolly got out and disappeared. While they were looking for her, Livia’s father died.

They put the funeral off by a week, but Livia can’t play at it. While her mother was in the basement eating with the congregants, Livia went upstairs and tried to play the piano, where Charlie startled her.

Livia realized that Faye had been helping to keep her mother’s hoarding at bay, but now it was everywhere, and Livia was at her wits’ end. She talked to Charlie every day and would often sneak into the church to practice her scales and try to get back some of what she had. She has fun playing chopsticks, recalling teaching Cyrus.

Then her mother, the executor of her father’s will, tells Livia that she has inherited the farm. Charlie, her mother, and half the town already knew. Charlie offers to teach her what to do. Often they would go for a ride to clear their heads.

Livia kept visiting Faye to escape her mother’s house and get the mothering she never got from her own mom. Eventually, Faye suggests that Livia move into Mawmaw’s house, a tiny apartment over the garage. She ate with the Cables some nights, but missed her mom’s car.

Faye is folding laundry with Livia when she confesses she’s know Charlie has been in love with Livia for some time, and she doesn’t want Livia to break his heart. Livia started to play for Charlie and every time she would say “I’ll never have Ondine again.”

One day she invited him into her bed, and that was that. They snuck around for a bit, but Faye knew. Livia went to talk to her mother about part ownership of the farm, but her mother never wanted it. She goes to Charlie and asks how long he’s known about the farm going to her – 2 years. He lets slip about the deal: that Willard wanted them to marry.

Livia begins to fuss about what her mother will think of them marrying, wondering what the wedding would look like, so they just head to the courthouse and get married right then. They settle into married life, and Charlie is great at taking care of the farm wisely.

She continues to play at the local Methodist church where she practiced as a child. Mickie and James got engaged, and Livia went to visit her mom at Christmas. Faye and Teddy wanted to swap homes with Livia and Charlie, so he could have a proper shower and not need to use the steps. Livia resisted, but really it was the Steinway piano that Faye’s patient gave her that sealed the deal on the home swap, but Teddy and Faye quickly moved to another place down the road.

Dolly ended up coming back, old and gray, and shocking all of them because she had a puppy, something they didn’t know she could do. Mickie and Charlie insist they call her Ondine, so she can never say “I’ll never have Ondine” again.

—— Ending follows below ——

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Review of Partita by Barbara Kingsolver

The Partita Summary: Ending

Prelude VII

Livia decided to burn a reasonable amount of her mother’s possessions on Sunday. She asked Charlie to come help oversee the burning later. Gaz won’t leave Livia’s side despite hating the blaze. She was ready to burn the dresses her mom took to Nashville, but decided to keep them.

Charlie arrives and sits with her before asking what she’s doing. Livia says it’s a cremation, and Charlie says he gets that she’s mad at her mom. Livia says she’s trying to not be. She wants to burn what she can, sell or donate the rest, and bury the unburnables in the backyard with James’s backhoe to save on $100 trips to the dump.

Livia feels awful that the trips cost so much, and James has been footing the bill. Charlie explains that they all feel awful for her for having to deal with her mother’s hoard. He calls what her mother left her a sin. They sit and have coffee, and Livia thinks about how she’s more affectionate to Gaz than Charlie. She compares her brain to her mother’s house, how she’s stored up so much guilt and blame, not to mention the things she’s said and hasn’t said. She tries to tell him he can leave if he wants, but he says he needs to stay with her.

She recounts the suicide note to Charlie and confesses that if she doesn’t think of Cy every day, she’d let him go, and that would feel like him dying all over again. She tackles her mom’s room, throwing away the happy-ever-afters of random children. Then she burned her recital programs alongside her mother’s, before burning Cyrus’s suicide letters, and finally her mother’s wedding dress.

As they watch the fire, Livia tells Charlie about her plan to see Sigurd the next day. Before she could go into detail, the roof caught fire, and Mickie and the kids had to come with the irrigator to put it out.

At home that night, Livia and Charlie finally talk. She says she’s sad that she doesn’t deserve a good life; he says he feels like he doesn’t deserve the wonderful wife he has. He says he feels old because he grew up witnessing other kids cry about little things while he was dealing with big things. She says she would move a mountain for him because she loves him that much. She finally tells him about Sigurd, and he says he’ll make up Mawmaw’s house.

Al Fine – final piece of music

It’s Monday, and Livia has organized a recital for Sigurd featuring all her students. She told the students they were playing for a friend from California who needed cheering up. Livia had told Charlie who Sigurd was: the old boyfriend from college in Nashville for a doctor.

Sigurd arrived, and they shook hands, Livia realizing when it hurt that Sigurd didn’t know her anymore or about her injury. Sigurd and Charlie sat on either side of her in the front row during the recital. All her students played.

When a student gets stage fright, she helps her and then looks at the empty space between the two men before deciding she’ll tell Charlie about the pregnancy, her mental state, and why she almost lost her hand tomorrow. She knows Charlie will hate Sigurd after hearing the full story. She holds hands with Charlie and remarks that he knows how to hold her broken hand.

While listening, she realizes that she doesn’t need to worry about telling Charlie that “surviving in broken parts is not a bad thing.”

Deronne gets up and plays his own creation, a jazz version of Bach Minuet in G, then he plays Gaspard de la Nuit. She’s shocked; she’d played this song so many times for Sigurd, explaining what each movement meant. She considered it their song. She realizes that Sigurd doesn’t recognize it. She just held his hand, too. She asked Deronne why he decides to play it and he says for Gaz.

The recital took place at the same Methodist church she’d played at as a girl, the pastor long dead, but she still had the key.

Partita Character Guide

Main Characters

• Livia Cable ‘nee Bohusz – Main protagonist
• Sigurd – Livia’s former lover
• Charlie Cable – Livia’s husband, farmer
• Jon Link – College boyfriend
• Livia’s Mother – hoarder, deceased in the present day
• Cyrus (Cy) – Livia’s brother, committed suicide when she was 11
• Gaz – Livia’s border collie

More Characters

• Willard – Livia’s Dad
• Teddy and Faye Cable – Charlie’s parents
• Mickie – Livia’s Sister-in-Law, wife of James, mother to Betts and Ethan
• James – Livia’s Brother-in-Law
• Dr. Betis – Livia’s college professor
• Stephania Schmidt – fellow student
• Herr Doctor Brockhaus – Singer that Livia accompanies one summer
• Ladawna – Physician’s assistant who helps Livia post surgery
• Edwina, Deronne, Bella, Cleo, Rose, Callister Kids – Livia’s students
• Amadeo – Diner manager
• Marshall Stilwell – Cyrus’s boyfriend
• Bassoon (Greg) & Percussion – Jon Link’s friends
• Dolly – Livia’s Dad’s Dog, Ondine’s mother, Gaz’s grandmother
• Ondine – Livia’s Dog, born of Dolly, mother to Gaz

What to Read After Partita by Barbara Kingsolver

Frequently Asked Questions

Epilogue

Did you like my summary of Partita? Will you choose Partita by Barbara Kingsolver for your next book club? I think it would be an excellent discussion if you do!