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 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. Taking its place alongside the classic works of postcolonial literature, this ambitious novel establishes Barbara Kingsolver as one of the most thoughtful and daring of modern writers.

"...Barbara Kingsolver's powerful new book is actually an old-fashioned 19th-century novel, a Hawthornian tale of sin and redemption, and the 'dark necessity' of history ...grappled with social injustice, with the intersection of public events with private concerns and the competing claims of community and individual will... One of the things that keep The Poisonwood Bible from becoming overly schematic and lends the novel a fierce emotional undertow is Ms Kingsolver's love of detail, her eye for the small facts of daily life." - Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times Book Review

Barbara Kingsolver is an American novelist, essayist, and poet. She earned degrees in Biology at DePauw University and the University of Arizona and worked as a freelance writer before she began writing novels. She has received numerous awards, including the UK's Orange Prize for Fiction 2010, for The Lacuna and the National Humanities Medal.

The Poisonwood Bible

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