Title: The Poisonwood Bible
Author: Barbara Kingsolver
Context: The Poisonwood Bible (1998) is a post colonial novel by Barbara Kingsolver. The tale is about a Baptist missionary and his family from the different voices of five separate narrators. The author Barbara Kingsolver has used a surprisingly old novelistic technique by using different characters to narrate a tale in a sequence of monologues.
Synopsis: Narrators of the story are a wife, Orleanna Price and daughters of a fierce, evangelical Baptist named Nathan Price. In 1959 he takes his mission as well as his family to the Belgian Congo. While leaving they take along with them everything they thought they would require from home, however very soon they catastrophically realize that right from the Scripture to garden seeds and all of it, is transformed on the soil of Africa. Then follows a story filled with suspense about the undoing of the tragic family and the outstanding reconstruction in postcolonial Africa over a period of thirty years.
Narration is done by the mother and the five daughters turn by turn while describing their lives. They narrate about the way they spent their life in a remote village in the Congo and fortunes of the mission of Nathan Price while he converted the people of Congo. Nathan is unwilling to admit weakness, doubt and resists sympathy.
Other works by the Author:
1988 – The Bean Trees
1990 – Animal Dreams
1993 – Pigs in Heaven
2000 – Prodigal Summer
2009 – The Lacuna
2012 – Flight Behavior
2018 – Unsheltered
1995 – High Tide in Tucson: Essays from Now or Never
2002 – Small Wonder: Essays
Poetry
1992 – Another America
Nonfiction
1989 – Holding the Line: Women in the Great Arizona Mine Strike of 1983
2002 – Last Stand: America’s Virgin Lands.
2007 – Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life