A Fine Balance
By Rohinton Mistry
A Lesson Before Dying
By Ernest J. Gaines
A Map of the World
By Jane Hamilton
A Million Little Pieces
By James Frey
A Virtuous Woman
By Kaye Gibbons
Anna Karenina
By Leo Tolstoy
As I Lay Dying
By William Faulkner
Back Roads
By Tawni O’Dell
Black and Blue
By Anna Quindlen
Breath, Eyes, Memory
By Edwidge Danticat
Cane River
By Lalita Tademy
Cry, the Beloved Country
By Alan Paton
Daughter of Fortune
By Isabel Allende
Drowning Ruth
By Christina Schwarz
East of Eden
By John Steinbeck
Ellen Foster
By Kaye Gibbons
Fall on Your Knees
By Ann-Marie MacDonald
Gap Creek: The Story Of A Marriage
By Robert Morgan
Here on Earth
By Alice Hoffman
House of Sand and Fog
By Andre Dubus III
I Know This Much Is True
By Wally Lamb
Icy Sparks
By Gwyn Hyman Rubio
Jewel
By Bret Lott
Light in August
By William Faulkner
Midwives
By Chris Bohjalian
Mother of Pearl
By Melinda Haynes
Night
By Elie Wiesel
One Hundred Years of Solitude
By Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Open House
By Elizabeth Berg
Paradise
By Toni Morrison
River, Cross My Heart
By Breena Clarke
She’s Come Undone
By Wally Lamb
Song of Solomon
By Toni Morrison
Songs In Ordinary Time
By Mary McGarry Morris
Sula
By Toni Morrison
Stolen Lives: Twenty Years in a Desert Jail
By Malika Oufkir
Stones from the River
By Ursula Hegi
Tara Road
By Maeve Binchy
The Best Way to Play
By Bill Cosby
The Bluest Eye
By Toni Morrison
The Book of Ruth
By Jane Hamilton
The Corrections
By Jonathan Franzen
The Deep End of the Ocean
By Jacquelyn Mitchard
The Good Earth
By Pearl S. Buck
The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter
By Carson McCullers
The Heart of a Woman
By Maya Angelou
The Known World
By Edward P. Jones
The Meanest Thing to Say
By Bill Cosby
The Pilot’s Wife
By Anita Shreve
The Poisonwood Bible
By Barbara Kingsolver
The Rapture of Canaan
By Sheri Reynolds
The Reader
By Bernhard Schlink
The Sound and the Fury
By William Faulkner
The Treasure Hunt
By Bill Cosby
Vinegar Hill
By A. Manette Ansay
We Were the Mulvaneys
By Joyce Carol Oates
What Looks Like Crazy on an Ordinary Day
By Pearl Cleage
Where the Heart Is
By Billie Letts
While I Was Gone
By Sue Miller
White Oleander
By Janet Fitch
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By Barbara Kingsolver
Oprah Winfrey’s Book Club Selection: 2000
As any reader of The Mosquito Coast knows, men who drag their families to far-off climes in pursuit of an Idea seldom come
to any good, while those familiar with At Play in the Fields of the Lord or Kalimantaan understand that the minute a
missionary sets foot on the fictional stage, all hell is about to break loose. So when Barbara Kingsolver sends missionary
Nathan Price along with his wife and four daughters off to Africa in The Poisonwood Bible, you can be sure that salvation
is the one thing they're not likely to find. The year is 1959 and the place is the Belgian Congo. Nathan, a Baptist preacher,
has come to spread the Word in a remote village reachable only by airplane. To say that he and his family are woefully unprepared
would be an understatement: "We came from Bethlehem, Georgia, bearing Betty Crocker cake mixes into the jungle," says Leah, one
of Nathan's daughters. But of course it isn't long before they discover that the tremendous humidity has rendered the mixes
unusable, their clothes are unsuitable, and they've arrived in the middle of political upheaval as the Congolese seek to wrest
independence from Belgium. In addition to poisonous snakes, dangerous animals, and the hostility of the villagers to Nathan's
fiery take-no-prisoners brand of Christianity, there are also rebels in the jungle and the threat of war in the air. Could things
get any worse?
In fact they can and they do. The first part of The Poisonwood Bible revolves around Nathan's intransigent, bullying personality
and his effect on both his family and the village they have come to. As political instability grows in the Congo, so does the
local witch doctor's animus toward the Prices, and both seem to converge with tragic consequences about halfway through the novel.
From that point on, the family is dispersed and the novel follows each member's fortune across a span of more than 30 years.
The Poisonwood Bible is arguably Barbara Kingsolver's most ambitious work, and it reveals both her great strengths and her weaknesses.
As Nathan Price's wife and daughters tell their stories in alternating chapters, Kingsolver does a good job of differentiating the
voices. But at times they can grate--teenage Rachel's tendency towards precious malapropisms is particularly annoying (students practice
their "French congregations"; Nathan's refusal to take his family home is a "tapestry of justice"). More problematic is Kingsolver's
tendency to wear her politics on her sleeve; this is particularly evident in the second half of the novel, in which she uses her
characters as mouthpieces to explicate the complicated and tragic history of the Belgian Congo.
Despite these weaknesses, Kingsolver's fully realized, three-dimensional characters make The Poisonwood Bible compelling, especially
in the first half, when Nathan Price is still at the center of the action. And in her treatment of Africa and the Africans she is at
her best, exhibiting the acute perception, moral engagement, and lyrical prose that have made her previous novels so successful.
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