The Poisonwood Bible
Barbara Kingsolver (1998)
“Five American women narrate the dismantling of a family — and an entire continent — by one man's arrogant certainty that he alone knows God's will.”
At a Glance
In 1959, Baptist preacher Nathan Price drags his wife Orleanna and four daughters — Rachel, Leah, Adah, and Ruth May — from Georgia to the Belgian Congo to save African souls. His zealotry blinds him to the reality around him: the culture he dismisses, the politics exploding beyond his village, and the family he destroys. Ruth May dies of a snakebite. Orleanna and the daughters eventually flee. Nathan stays and is eventually killed by villagers years later. The daughters narrate their survival, guilt, and transformation across the following decades, never escaping the Congo's shadow.
Read full summary →Why This Book Matters
The Poisonwood Bible was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 1999, an Oprah Book Club selection, and has sold over five million copies. It arrived at a moment when American literary fiction was beginning to seriously reckon with imperialism from the colonizer's perspective rather than the colonized's — a complement to the postcolonial literature of Achebe, Naipaul, and Rushdie. Its five-narrator structure influenced a generation of multi-voiced novels.
Diction Profile
Ranges from Rachel's chatty teen malapropisms to Adah's dense palindromic language-play to Orleanna's formal grief-register to Ruth May's simple present-tense clarity
Very high