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.
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A remarkable, unromantic portrait of a family of Southern Baptist missionaries in the 1960s Belgian Congo, "The Poisonwood Bible" is perhaps the pinnacle of novelist, essayist, and poet Barbara Kingsolver's career, earning her a Pulitzer Prize nomination. Nathan Price, a zealous and self-righteous Baptist preacher, his wife and four daughters leave Georgia for the Congo in 1959 with the wrong supplies, no relevant information about the Congo or the Congolese, and good intentions . They discover a new culture, within which their social and value systems have no place and often lead to disaster. They discover a world of dangerous flora and fauna, where a careless step in their own front yard can result in injury or even death. "The Poisonwood Bible" is a moving cautionary tale, warning the reader that the line between devoutness and fanaticism is as fine as life and death.
HPB Staff Review