An evangelical Baptist named Nathan Price takes his family to the Belgian Congo in 1959. While the family is there, the country fights for its independence from Belgium. Its first prime minister is murdered, and the CIA stages a coup.

The novel is narrated from five very different points of view – those of Price’s wife Oleanna, and of their four daughters, Rachel, the twins Leah and Adah, and Ruth May. Through their experiences and reflections, Kingsolver teases out the insidious ways in which they are part of the imperialist and capitalist project impacting the Congo.

“...the more the Prices speak, the odder they seem, and the more intelligible and reasonable seem the habits of the supposedly benighted people they have come to instruct,” says a review of the novel in The Guardian.

“A powerful new epic…She has with infinitely steady hands worked the prickly threads of religion, politics, race, sin, and redemption into a thing of terrible beauty,” says the Los Angeles Times Book Review.

The novel was selected for Oprah’s Book Club, and won the Boeke Prize. It was also a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in fiction.

Published in 1998.