New York Times Bestseller - An Oprah Book Club Pick
"Powerful . . . [Kingsolver] has with infinitely steady hands worked
the prickly threads of religion, politics, race, sin and redemption into
a thing of terrible beauty." --Los Angeles Times Book Review
Taking its place alongside the classic works of postcolonial
literature, this ambitious novel established Barbara Kingsolver as one
of the most thoughtful and daring of modern writers.
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.