The Poisonwood Bible
by Barbara Kingsolver
Summary
Nathan Price, a fierce Baptist missionary, moves his wife Orleanna and four daughters, Rachel, twins Leah and Adah, and young Ruth May, from Georgia to the village of Kilanga in the Belgian Congo in 1959, intent on baptizing the village whether it wants baptism or not. The novel is narrated entirely by the five Price women in rotating chapters, Nathan himself never given a voice of his own. Their arrival coincides almost exactly with the Congo's push toward independence and the political chaos that follows, assassinations, coups, and the installation of Mobutu Sese Seko with American backing, events the family experiences mostly at a remove, through rumor and disruption, while Nathan's own mission collapses under his refusal to adapt an evangelism built for Georgia to a village with its own gods and its own reasons to distrust him. Disaster strikes the family directly when Ruth May, the youngest, is bitten by a green mamba and dies; Orleanna finally leaves Nathan afterward, walking out with her surviving daughters. The three sisters scatter into entirely different lives: Rachel drifts into a series of marriages and a hotel business, building a life of studied obliviousness; Leah stays in Africa, marries the teacher and independence activist Anatole, and commits herself to the country her father tried to convert; Adah, whose partial paralysis Nathan always treated as a mark of shame, becomes a scientist in the United States. Nathan himself, still preaching alone in the bush years later, is finally killed by villagers after being blamed, in a moment of communal panic, for a crocodile attack.
Five very different narrating voices across roughly five hundred pages, Rachel's malapropisms, Adah's palindromes, Leah's earnest certainty, make Kingsolver's structural ambition visible on every page rather than only in outline.
Historical Context & Significance
HarperFlamingo published The Poisonwood Bible in 1998. It was a finalist for the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, the 1999 PEN/Faulkner Award, which went to Michael Cunningham's The Hours, and the Orange Prize for Fiction, and it won South Africa's reader voted Boeke Prize in 2000, a real prize the novel actually took even as three more prominent American and British ones passed it by. Michiko Kakutani in the New York Times called the novel powerful while noting its social allegories could turn heavy handed, and John Mullan in the Guardian praised it as remarkable not just for its story but for its narrative form.
Oprah Winfrey selected it for her book club in 2000, pushing it past the finalist lists and onto bestseller charts for months. Kingsolver said in 2015 that she was writing a screenplay herself to keep the book intact, and in 2019 Amy Adams's production company took the rights to develop it as an HBO limited series, with Kingsolver co writing.