The Poisonwood Bible

What Readers Say

"Life changing" comes up repeatedly, and one reader says they're "reading slowly to savor the whole thing." Another says they've bought so many copies for gifts that they "practically financed a summer home for Barbara Kingsolver." One reader describes a particular scene as "one of the best-written scenes in any book I've read" — and doesn't name it, which is correct, because you'll know it when you get there. It makes people ugly cry and also keeps them reading through the tears. The debate about whether Demon Copperhead or this is Kingsolver's masterpiece tends to resolve toward this one: "It is a great book, but The Poisonwood Bible is her masterpiece, and an astonishing piece of literature."

Who It's For

A missionary family arrives in the Belgian Congo in 1959 — the American Baptist father, his wife, and four daughters — and everything they brought with them proves calamitously wrong on African soil. The five female perspectives (wife and four daughters) give the novel its structural intelligence; you understand more than any single narrator does. One reader says it was "one of my first exposures of how effed up it is to impose one's own views and beliefs on another culture" — that's the book in one sentence.

Reading Context

633 pages, but readers describe it as a page-turner rather than a slog. The audiobook gets specific recommendations. Read it alongside or before Demon Copperhead if you want the full Kingsolver range — this is her at her most structurally ambitious, that one is her most immediate. Pair with Heart of Darkness if you want the older view of the same territory, though you'll understand The Poisonwood Bible as a correction of what Conrad missed.