The Poisonwood Bible
Barbara Kingsolver, 1998
Historical fiction Contemporary fictionLiterary fictionMystery, thriller & crime
A Baptist family from Georgia arrives in the Congo in 1959, and each daughter tells what their father’s certainty costs them.
Feels like unease, grief and awe. About family and faith.
A page from the book
Grief has a weight that only shows itself when you stop moving.
As long as I kept moving, my grief streamed out behind me like a swimmer’s long hair in water. I knew the weight was there but it didn’t touch me. Only when I stopped did the slick, dark stuff of it come floating around my face, catching my arms and throat till I began to drown. So I just didn’t stop. Barbara Kingsolver.Kingsolver lived in the Congo as a child while her father worked as a doctor; the novel draws on that time.
Books that feel like this
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Demon Copperhead
Barbara Kingsolver, 2022
A foster kid in opioid-era Appalachia tells his own story with grit, humor, and a voice that refuses to be pitied.
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Questions readers ask
- What is The Poisonwood Bible like?
- Feels like unease, grief and awe. About family and faith.
- What should I read after The Poisonwood Bible?
- If you liked The Poisonwood Bible, try The Covenant of Water (Abraham Verghese), The Color Purple (Alice Walker) and The Thorn Birds (Colleen McCullough).
A taste of the feed
The water you step into is never only yours.
The water she first stepped into minutes ago is long gone and yet it is here, past and present and future inexorably coupled, like time made incarnate. This is the covenant of water: that they’re all linked inescapably by their acts of commission and omission, and no one stands alone.
The Covenant of Water · Abraham Verghese
Where do you look for God when prayer stops working?
God is inside you and inside everybody else. You come into the world with God. But only them that search for it inside find it. And sometimes it just manifest itself even if you not looking, or don’t know what you looking for. Trouble do it for most folks, I think. Sorrow, lord. Feeling like shit. It? I ask. Yeah, It. God ain’t a he or a she, but a It. But what do it look like? I ask. Don’t look like nothing, she say. It ain’t a picture show. It ain’t something you can look at apart from anything else, including yourself.
The Color Purple · Alice Walker
Do we ever really change, or merely become ourselves?
Each of us has something within us which won’t be denied, even if it makes us scream aloud to die. We are what we are, that’s all. Like the old Celtic legend of the bird with the thorn in its breast, singing its heart out and dying. Because it has to, its self-knowledge can’t affect or change the outcome, can it? Everyone singing his own little song, convinced it’s the most wonderful song the world has ever heard. Don’t you see? We create our own thorns, and never stop to count the cost. All we can do is suffer the pain, and tell ourselves it was well worth it.
The Thorn Birds · Colleen McCullough
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