Grammy-Nominated Pianist Han Chen Is Heard On Audiobook Version Of Partita, A New Novel By Barbara Kingsolver On Harper, For Sale October 6, 2026

GRAMMY-nominated pianist Han Chen provides the background music for the audiobook of Pulitzer Prize-winning author Barbara Kingsolver’s new novel PARTITA. Narrated by Megan Tusing, this version will be released on all major audiobook platforms, October 6, 2026. The full list of repertoire follows:

A deeply moving, unforgettable novel about art, music, class, memory, and the life-altering power of love, PARTITA is a book Ms. Kingsolver has been waiting her whole life to write.

Livia Cable, a piano teacher living a quiet life with her husband in the farm country where she grew up, receives a shocking phone call from an old lover which shakes her to her core. Decades earlier, the caller knew her as Livia Bohusz, a music conservatory student estranged from her home and family, uncertain of anything except her passion for music and her promise as an extraordinary pianist. His request, now, to see her again stirs up ghosts she has kept at bay for a lifetime.

Shifting between past and present, the story evolves as Livia decides whether to meet her ex-lover or to reject the reunion. Step by step, in memories framed as musical dances, she re-experiences childhood loss, abandonment, self-immolating passion, and perilous attachment to a man who broke her belief in love and ruptured the course of her life.

With razor-sharp acuity, Ms. Kingsolver addresses the issue of class barriers, the risks of ambition, and the timeless, life-changing powers of art. Told in movements that mirror a Bach partita, the novel unfolds with the precision and emotional power of music itself: each section building on the last, each theme returning transformed.

For more information, please visit pianist Han Chen’s website, and author Barbara Kingsolver’s website.  

A fearless performer with seemingly limitless imagination and possessed with uncanny energy, GRAMMY Award-nominated pianist Han Chen brings a Romantic sensibility to his interpretations of scores old and new, which he plays with both rigor and insight. Gold Medalist at the 2013 China International Piano Competition and a prizewinner at the 2018 Honens International Piano Competition, Mr. Chen has also been praised by Gramophone as “impressively commanding and authoritative” and further cited by The New York Times for his “graceful touch,” “rhythmic precision” and “hypnotic charm.”

Mr. Chen’s musical vision is manifest in his four solo albums focusing on Franz Liszt, Anton Rubinstein, Thomas Adès, György Ligeti, and a concerto album featuring Florence Price’s Piano Concerto in One Movement in D minor (conductor John Jeter, Malmö Opera Orchestra), which was nominated for a GRAMMY Award in the Best Classical Instrumental Solo category.

Alex Ross, classical music critic of The New Yorker, who selected Mr. Chen’s disc of the Ligeti Études and Capriccios as a “Notable Classical Recording of 2023,” characterized him as follows: “The Taiwanese pianist Han Chen, a noted interpreter of the Ligeti Études and other modernist repertory, has made a blistering album of the [Liszt] opera transcriptions.”—The New Yorker, September 4, 2023

Reviewing the Ligeti recording in the August 2023 issue of Gramophone, Jed Distler wrote “[He is] one of the few pianists who handles both gnarly contemporary scores and over-the-top Romantic showpieces with equal authority and style. … [H]e surmounts the sophisticated rhythmic challenges of Ligeti's Études to a T, while infusing them with plenty of tonal allure and personality. … Chen aims for clarity and balance over sheer speed, yielding steadier results and more cogent interplay between the hands.”

Attending “Infinite Staircase,” Mr. Chen’s recent traversal of the 18 Ligeti Etudes and 18 commissioned companion pieces, George Grella titled his review: “Han Chen’s remarkable playing equal to the genius of Ligeti’s Etudes” and went on to exclaim: “He was astonishing, with some of the finest pianism one has ever witnessed. Beyond sheer dexterity, this was tremendously musical playing, with every phrase clear and pointed in a certain direction, fluid control of dynamics and form, a combination of articulation and force that was hard to believe. One had the feeling that Chen was deep inside the work, opening up every detail of Ligeti’s musical personality.”—New York Classical Review, September 25, 2023

Reviewing this event in I Care If You Listen, Lana Norris summarized it as a “marathon of canonical music and new works that displayed exquisite programming, stupendous technique, and forward-thinking expansion of classical music’s best traditions.”—September 28, 2023

Mr. Chen is equally a powerful performer of the classic piano repertoire. Reviewing Mr. Chen performing Beethoven’s Sonata No. 29 Op. 106 Hammerklavier, Lee Eiseman of The Boston Music Intelligencer had this to say: “Oxygenated by powerful intellectual bellows and endowed with muscular forearms, Chen didn’t just hammer Beethoven’s formidably relentless and ever-modern challenge to pianists and listeners; with fire and tempering plunges he alternately annealed, welded, sintered, and sensitively stretched the well-wrought iron into impressive curls and shapely forms. His carefully plotted interpretations conveyed nuance and compelling gesture through very well-graduated colorations and dynamics from white hot to warmly glowing. No two repeated chords sounded the same. Chen’s Beethoven seemed to anticipate Berg and Ligeti on this night.”—August 19, 2023

Mr. Chen has appeared as soloist with the Calgary Philharmonic, Fort Worth Symphony, Lansing Symphony, Lexington Philharmonic, Hong Kong Philharmonic, National Taiwan Symphony, Xiamen Philharmonic, among others. In December 2022, he made his Lincoln Center debut with Riverside Symphony at Alice Tully Hall performing Mozart’s early masterwork, the Piano Concerto No. 9 Jeunehomme. Mr. Chen has performed as solo recitalist internationally. In demand as a chamber musician, he has performed with New York Philharmonic String Quartet while regularly collaborating with Ensemble Échappé. In 2021, Chen launched Migration Music, an online series of performances and interviews with immigrant composers.

Han Chen has studied with Yoheved Kaplinsky, Wha Kyung Byun, and Ursula Oppens at The Juilliard School, New England Conservatory, and CUNY Graduate Center. He recently received his doctoral degree from CUNY. He is represented by Black Tea Music. Mr. Chen is a Steinway Artist.

Barbara Kingsolver grew up in rural Kentucky, earned degrees in biology from DePauw University and the University of Arizona, and has worked as a freelance writer and author since 1985. She has traveled throughout the world as a researcher and journalist, and lived for nearly two decades in Tucson, Arizona, before moving back to southern Appalachia. Since 2004, she and her husband have raised their family and farmed in southwestern Virginia, in the mountains she considers her home territory.

Her books, in order of publication, are: The Bean Trees (1988), Homeland (1989), Holding the Line: Women in the Great Arizona Mine Strike (1989), Animal Dreams (1990), Another America (1992), Pigs in Heaven (1993), High Tide in Tucson (1995), The Poisonwood Bible (1998), Prodigal Summer (2000), Small Wonder (2002), Last Stand: America’s Virgin Lands, with photographer Annie Griffiths Belt (2002), Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life (2007), The Lacuna (2009), Flight Behavior (2012), Unsheltered (2018), How To Fly (In 10,000 Easy Lessons) (2020), Demon Copperhead (2022), Coyote’s Wild Home (2023), and Partita, (2026). She served as editor for Best American Short Stories 2001. Her books have been translated into more than thirty languages, and have been adopted into the core literature curriculum in high schools and colleges throughout the nation. She has contributed to more than fifty literary anthologies, and her reviews and articles have appeared in many major U.S. newspapers and magazines.

Demon Copperhead won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction and was named the Best Book of the 21st Century by a New York Times readers’ poll. Other honors for her work include the National Humanities Medal in 2000; multiple awards from the American Booksellers Association and the American Library Association; and selection as the 1999 Pulitzer Prize finalist. Two of Kingsolver’s books have been Oprah Book Club picks, and she is the only two-time winner of Britain’s prestigious Women’s Prize (formerly known as the Orange Prize). She was awarded the Dayton Literary Peace Prize for the body of her work, is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and received The National Book Award for Lifetime Achievement.

Barbara’s husband, Steven Hopp, is an environmental educator and active member of numerous local nonprofits. Their two daughters, Camille (born in 1987) and Lily (1996), also live with their families in southwestern Virginia. In addition to their professional and community engagements, Steven and Barbara raise an extensive vegetable garden, chickens, and a flock of Icelandic sheep that supply Barbara’s knitting avocation.

For further information, please contact Hemsing Associates at 212-772-1132 or visit www.hemsingpr.com.

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