The Poisonwood Bible was published by HarperFlamingo in 1998 and became Kingsolver’s most acclaimed and commercially successful novel, selling over four million copies. It was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and won the National Book Prize of South Africa.
Nathan Price, a fierce Baptist minister haunted by his cowardice in the Bataan Death March, brings his wife Orleanna and four daughters — Rachel, Leah, Adah, and Ruth May — to the village of Kilanga in the Belgian Congo in 1959, one year before independence. He intends to save souls. He cannot learn the local language properly (his mispronunciation of “Jesus is beloved” comes out as “Jesus is a poisonwood tree”), cannot adapt his agricultural methods to tropical soil, cannot accept that his congregation has its own sophisticated spiritual life, and cannot hear the political earthquake happening around him.
The novel is narrated in rotation by the five female voices — each daughter and Orleanna — spanning thirty years from 1959 to 1998. Through their eyes, Kingsolver parallels the personal catastrophe of the Price family with the political catastrophe of the Congo: the CIA-backed assassination of Patrice Lumumba, the installation of Mobutu, and thirty years of kleptocratic dictatorship supported by the United States. Nathan Price’s missionary arrogance is America’s arrogance writ domestic.
Collecting The Poisonwood Bible
First edition (HarperFlamingo, New York, 1998): Boards with dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine in jacket: $80–$200
- Signed first: $200–$500