It was a dark and stormy night, and Barbara Kingsolver was sitting at Charles Dickens’ desk at his seaside home in Broadstairs, Kent. She’d been trying for three years to write her next novel, “a big, hard story” about lost kids, and was getting desperate, wondering if she’d ever find a way in. And then Dickens told her how.

“It was a spine-chilling experience,” she says. The wind was howling and rattling the windows and her husband was fast asleep in Dickens’ bedroom while she sat feeling the November cold coming in, wondering why they’d rented the place. Then the conversation began. “He said things to me that felt they came from outside my brain.”

The solution was quite simple. This was the desk where Dickens had written David Copperfield, a novel about a boy finding his way out of institutionalised poverty, abuse, hardship and exploitation. All Kingsolver had to do was rewrite the story and make it about a boy growing up in 1990s Appalachia. “He let the child tell the story,” she says of Dickens. “Nobody doubts the child.”

Kingsolver is telling me this story as she sits at her own desk, in an office “full of all the mess it takes to write a book”. She’s looking out through a wall of windows at a beautiful peaceful forest scene in the southern Appalachian mountains, where she and her husband, Steven Hopp, run a farm. The leaves are just starting to turn red and gold. But there’s a dark side to this region, and that’s the subject of her novel, Demon Copperhead.

Of course the title, also the name of her redhead hero, is a Dickensian joke, and the story and characters, with similar names to David’s friends and enemies, are closely modelled on the original: “The man really knew what he was doing, he was a master of plot.”

She’d always loved the humour in Dickens – at 12 she strong-armed her siblings into putting on a puppet show of A Christmas Carol – but this was a whole new level of discovery. She worked through what she thought of as a translation, or a masterclass: at one stage she had a spreadsheet with notes for all 66 of the David Copperfield chapters and her own notes for what would happen in each of her corresponding chapters.

Despite her admiration for the author who she calls her “genius friend”, she doesn’t want to talk too much about Dickens or his novel. You don’t have to have read David Copperfield in order to read Demon Copperhead, she insists. And in some ways she’s departed from her model, particularly in the character of her hero.

“David is kind of wide-eyed, trying to see the best in people. Demon is much more savvy and he’s already had such a rough life. He quickly becomes very cynical about what adults have to offer, because in his world they never come through. For most of the story, there’s not a single adult he can count on.”

In her 34-year career, Kingsolver has told many big stories with strong social and political themes. She’s won numerous awards for her 18 books, notably The Poisonwood Bible and The Lacuna, and prizes for her body of work include the National Humanities Medal, the highest US honour for service through the arts. But Demon Copperhead is perhaps her most ambitious novel yet, with a theme of nothing less than where and how her country has failed its children.