That’s my excuse, yet none of them really needed me all that much. I had washed up there on the riptide of my husband’s confidence and the undertow of my children’s needs. The monkey sailed right overhead, and on a more earthly plane men in locked rooms bargained for the Congo’s treasure. In the year of our Lord 1960 a monkey barreled through space in an American rocket a Kennedy boy took the chair out from under a fatherly general named Ike and the whole world turned on an axis called the Congo. Taking its place alongside the classic works of postcolonial literature, this ambitious novel establishes Kingsolver as one of the most thoughtful and daring writers of modern times. Their passionately intertwined stories become a compelling exploration of moral risk and personal responsibility.ĭancing between the dark comedy of human failings and the breathtaking possibilities of human hope, The Poisonwood Bible possesses all that has distinguished Barbara Kingsolver’s previous work, and extends this beloved writer’s vision to an entirely new level. Ultimately each must strike her own separate path to salvation. These sharply observant girls, who arrive in the Congo with racial preconceptions forged in 1950s Georgia, will be marked in surprisingly different ways by their father’s intractable mission, and by Africa itself.
Also narrating the story, by turns, are her four daughters - the self-centered, teenaged Rachel shrewd adolescent twins Leah and Adah and Ruth May, a prescient five-year-old. Against this backdrop, Orleanna Price reconstructs the story of her evangelist husband’s part in the Western assault on Africa, a tale indelibly darkened by her own losses and unanswerable questions about her own culpability. 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. What follows is a suspenseful epic of one family’s tragic undoing and remarkable reconstruction over the course of three decades in postcolonial Africa. 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. 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.
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