In 1959, a missionary named Nathan Price transports his wife and four daughters to a remote village in the Belgian Congo to convert the natives. The family is met with hostility from the locals, particularly a vengeful witch doctor. They also face bands of desperate rebels, dangerous wildlife, and the inevitable petty inconveniences a hyper-conventional Midwestern family might expect to face in an alien land. After tragedy strikes, the family leaves the Congo and Kingsolver details the subsequent fates of each of the female members, each narrating in her own distinctive voice. Besides being a vivid novel about family and a tour de force of characterization, THE POISONWOOD BIBLE is also a vehicle for Kingsolver's ideas about the Congo's disastrous history and America's role in it.

We came from Bethlehem, Georgia bearing Betty Crocker cake mixes into the jungle. My sisters and I were all counting on having one birthday apiece during our twelve-month mission. "And heaven knows," our mother predicted, "they won't have Betty Crocker in the Congo."

In this risky but resoundingly successful novel, Kingsolver leaves the Southwest, the setting of most of her work (The Bean Trees; Animal Dreams) and follows an evangelical Baptist minister's family to the Congo in the late 1950s, entwining their fate with that of the country during three turbulent decades. Nathan Price's determination to convert the natives of the Congo to Christianity is, we gradually discover, both foolhardy and dangerous, unsanctioned by the church administration and doomed from the start by Nathan's self-righteousness. Fanatic and sanctimonious, Nathan is a domestic monster, too, a physically and emotionally abusive, misogynistic husband and father. He refuses to understand how his obsession with river baptism affronts the traditions of the villagers of Kalinga, and his stubborn concept of religious rectitude brings misery and destruction to all.Cleverly, Kingsolver never brings us inside Nathan's head but instead unfolds the tragic story of the Price family through the alternating points of view of Orleanna Price and her four daughters. Cast with her young children into primitive conditions but trained to be obedient to her husband, Orleanna is powerless to mitigate their situation. Meanwhile, each of the four Price daughters reveals herself through first-person narration, and their rich and clearly differentiated self-portraits are small triumphs. Rachel, the eldest, is a self-absorbed teenager who will never outgrow her selfish view of the world or her tendency to commit hilarious malapropisms. Twins Leah and Adah are gifted intellectually but are physically and emotionally separated by Adah's birth injury, which has rendered her hemiplagic. Leah adores her father; Adah, who does not speak, is a shrewd observer of his monumental ego. The musings of five- year-old Ruth May reflect a child's humorous misunderstanding of the exotic world to which she has been transported. By revealing the story through the female victims of Reverend Price's hubris, Kingsolver also charts their maturation as they confront or evade moral and existential issues and, at great cost, accrue wisdom in the crucible of an alien land. It is through their eyes that we come to experience the life of the villagers in an isolated community and the particular ways in which American and African cultures collide. As the girls become acquainted with the villagers, especially the young teacher Anatole, they begin to understand the political situation in the Congo: the brutality of Belgian rule, the nascent nationalism briefly fulfilled in the election of the short-lived Patrice Lumumba government, and the secret involvement of the Eisenhower administration in Lumumba's assassination and the installation of the villainous dictator Mobutu. In the end, Kingsolver delivers a compelling family saga, a sobering picture of the horrors of fanatic fundamentalism and an insightful view of an exploited country crushed by the heel of colonialism and then ruthlessly manipulated by a bastion of democracy. The book is also a marvelous mix of trenchant character portrayal, unflagging narrative thrust and authoritative background detail. The disastrous outcome of the forceful imposition of Christian theology on indigenous natural faith gives the novel its pervasive irony; but humor is pervasive, too, artfully integrated into the children's misapprehensions of their world; and suspense rises inexorably as the Price family's peril and that of the newly independent country of Zaire intersect. Kingsolver moves into new moral terrain in this powerful, convincing and emotionally resonant novel.

"...Barbara Kingsolver has dreamed a magnificent fiction and a ferocious bill of indictment."
-- John Leonard

"With the publication of THE POISONWOOD BIBLE, this easy, humorous, competent, syrupy writer has been elevated to the ranks of the greatest political novelists of our time. She is something new: a political novelist who is careful not to step on anyone's toes. Barbara Kingsolver does not finally give a hoot about Africa."
-- Lee Siegel

"In The Poisonwood Bible, Kingsolver is at the top of her fiction form. She writes spectacularly in the varied voices of the four daughters and the wife of Baptist missionary Nathan Price. The big bully of the pulpit transplants his family from Bethlehem, Georgia, to the Belgain congo, where they are often hilariously, but finally woefully, unprepared for the hardships of the jungle. Kingsolver also masterfully explicates the complex and tragic history of the Congolese rebels of 1959, their struggle for independence, and the outbreak of war." --  Kate Clinton

"...The Poisonwood Bible is ultimately a novel of character, a narrative shaped by keen-eyed women contemplating themselves and one another and a village whose familiarity it takes a tragedy to discover." -- Verlyn Klinkenborg

"...Barbara Kingsolver's powerful...book is actually an old-fashioned 19th-century novel, a Hawthornian tale of sin and redemption, and the 'dark necessity'of history." -- Michiko Kakutani

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 order 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. 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.