"The Poisonwood Bible" is a story told by the wife and four daughters of
Nathan Price, a fierce, evangelical Baptist who takes his family and
mission to the Belgian Congo in 1959. They carry with them everything
they believe they will need from home, but soon find that all of it--
from garden seeds to Scripture-- is calamitously transformed on African
soil. What follows is a suspenseful epic of one family's tragic undoing
and remarkable reconstruction over the course of three decades in
postcolonial Africa.
The novel is set against one of the most dramatic political chronicles
of the twentieth century: the Congo's fight for independence from
Belgium, the murder of its first elected prime minister, the CIA coup to
install his replacement, and the insidious progress of a world economic
order that robs the fledgling African nation of its autonomy. Against
this backdrop, Orleanna Price reconstructs the story of her evangelist
husband's part in the Western assault on Africa, a tale indelibly
darkened by her own losses and unanswerable questions about her own
culpability. Also narrating the story, by turns, are her four
daughters-- the self-centered, teenaged Rachel; shrewd adolescent twins
Leah and Adah; and Ruth May, a prescient five-year-old. These sharply
observant girls, who arrive in the Congo with racial preconceptions
forged in 1950s Georgia, will be marked in surprisingly different ways
by their father's intractable mission, and by Africa itself. Ultimately
each must strike her own separate path to salvation. Their passionately
intertwined stories become a compelling exploration of moral risk and
personal responsibility.
Dancing between the dark comedy of human failings and the breathtaking
possibilities of human hope, "The Poisonwood Bible" possesses all that
has distinguished Barbara Kingsolver's previous work, and extends this
beloved writer's vision to an entirely new level. Taking its place
alongside the classic works of postcolonial literature, this ambitious
novel establishes Kingsolver as one of the most thoughtful and daring of
modern writers.
