The Poisonwood Bible

The Poisonwood Bible is a 1998 novel by the American writer Barbara Kingsolver, published by HarperFlamingo. It is narrated by the wife and four daughters of Nathan Price, a Baptist missionary who moves his family from Georgia to the Belgian Congo in 1959.

The Prices arrive with everything they have decided they will need, from garden seeds to scripture, and almost all of it turns out to mean something different in Kilanga, a village on the Kwilu River. Nathan's mission is the fixed point the household arranges itself around, and each of the daughters registers a different part of what is happening to them and to their mother. The novel covers three decades.

The novel runs for three decades, through independence and the political violence that followed, and the family's story is tied to the country's rather than set against it. Because the account is shared between five narrators, the reader is given several versions of the same events, and the book is as interested in the way a story is told afterwards as in what happened.