The Poisonwood Bible, novel by the well-respected American writer Barbara Kingsolver. Published in 1998, it was the first of her novels to be set outside the United States.

The Poisonwood Bible takes place in what is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo and is narrated by Orleanna Price and her four daughters. It tells the story of what happens when Orleanna’s husband, the overzealous Southern Baptist preacher Nathan Price, moves his family from the U.S. state of Georgia to a village in the Belgian Congo in 1959 to convert the people to Christianity and a Western way of life. As a child, Kingsolver briefly lived in the Democratic Republic of the Congo with her parents, who were public health workers, but it was only in adulthood that she learned of the political situation that had seized the Congo at about that time, when the United States secretly plotted to sabotage the country’s independence. She wrote this novel to address and explore the issues around Western manipulations in other countries.

The missionary’s four children—teen beauty queen Rachel, idealistic tomboy Leah and her twin, the crippled and mute but clever Adah, and five-year-old Ruth May—react differently to their father’s work but all believe that they are bringing the blessings of civilization to the people in the village of Kilanga. The Price family immediately runs into difficulties. The vegetable garden that Nathan plants to teach the natives to grow their own food fails to produce fruits owing to the lack of pollinators for the foreign plants. His plan to baptize people in the river meets resistance because a crocodile in that river had recently killed a child, and his refusal to yield on this point causes their housekeeper to leave them. The schoolteacher, Anatole, tries to explain to Nathan that the village chief fears that Nathan’s religion will lead to a moral decline in the village, but he only succeeds in enraging Nathan.

Representatives of the Mission League arrive to tell the Price family that Congo is about to become independent and that Westerners should leave, but Nathan refuses to allow his family to board the plane that is sent to evacuate them. Later, when a hunt is organized in the midst of a dry spell that threatens the village with starvation, the villagers agree to allow Leah, by now an expert marksman, to join the hunt, despite the village’s religious leader’s warnings. The religious leader begins planting poisonous snakes in the homes of villagers connected with the Prices. Just as the girls figure out where the snakes are coming from, Ruth May is bitten and killed, prompting her mother to leave the village with her three surviving daughters. Rachel goes on to marry three men and inherit a hotel near Brazzaville; Leah marries Anatole and dedicates herself to working for African independence; and Adah takes on science as her religion and becomes an epidemiologist. The mother lives the rest of her life wracked with guilt.

The novel represents a powerful indictment of Western colonialism and post-colonialism, of cultural arrogance and simple greed. Each of the narrators must struggle to deal with their guilt over Ruth May’s death, but also with the guilt of their implication in the ruin of a country and, on a wider scale, Western guilt over its colonial past. The novel’s title comes from the poisonwood, an African tree that Nathan Price is warned not to touch; he ignores the warning and suffers painful swelling. In addition, the Kikongo word for “dearly beloved” is also the word for “poisonwood.” There can be no simpler allegory for Kingsolver’s message in The Poisonwood Bible.