About the book:
A Baptist missionary transplants his family to the Belgian Congo in 1959, the year of independence, and the novel follows the consequences across decades through the alternating voices of his wife and four daughters.
Kingsolver is interested in how American certainty religious, political, cultural collides with a reality it cannot accommodate.
Ambitious in scope and consistently readable, one of the most significant American novels of the 1990s.
Condition:
Good secondhand condition.
Some wear on cover.
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About the author:
Barbara Kingsolver (1955 to present)
Born in Annapolis, Maryland, in 1955 and raised partly in rural Kentucky and the Congo (where her father worked as a doctor), Barbara Kingsolver grew up with a deep awareness of place, politics, and the natural world. She studied biology and ecology before turning to writing. Her experiences in rural America and the Global South strongly inform her fiction, which often examines social justice, environmental issues, and the lives of ordinary people under pressure.
Her early success arrived with The Bean Trees (1988), a warm, socially engaged novel about a young woman finding community. Kingsolver developed a clear, compassionate, and politically aware style that blends realism with lyrical attention to landscape and character. Her work is accessible yet intellectually serious, often addressing class, race, gender, and environmental collapse.
Deeply influenced by the traditions of American social realism, Southern literature, and writers like Rachel Carson, Wendell Berry, and Alice Walker, Kingsolver in turn became one of the most prominent American novelists of her generation. She has influenced writers exploring environmental themes, rural life, and social justice, and is adjacent to authors such as Ann Patchett, Richard Powers, and many contemporary voices in literary fiction with strong ecological or political commitments.
Recurring preoccupations include the moral costs of economic systems, the beauty and fragility of the natural world, the resilience of women and marginalized communities, cultural displacement, and the possibility of meaningful resistance. Major works include The Poisonwood Bible (1998), Prodigal Summer (2000), The Lacuna (2009), Flight Behaviour (2012), and the Pulitzer Prize-winning Demon Copperhead (2022).
Kingsolver has also written essays, poetry, and non-fiction on food and sustainability. She lives in rural Appalachia and remains an active voice on environmental and social issues.
Barbara Kingsolvers influence on contemporary American literature is significant: she has helped keep socially and ecologically engaged fiction vibrant and readable, while remaining utterly unique in her blend of scientific awareness, moral clarity, and deep empathy for working-class and rural lives.
