The Poisonwood Bible is a story told by the wife and four daughters of Nathan Price, a fierce, evangelical Baptist who takes his family and mission to the Belgian Congo in 1959. They carry with them everything they believe they will need from home, but soon find that all of it–from garden seeds to Scripture–is calamitously transformed on African soil. What follows is a suspenseful epic of one family’s tragic undoing and remarkable reconstruction over the course of three decades in postcolonial Africa.

The book takes place in the backdrop of the Congo’s fight for independence from Belgium, the murder of its first prime minister, a CIA coup, and the progress of a world economic order to rob the fledgling African nation of its sovereignty. But this book isn’t solely about Africans. The Price family’s attitudes towards race have been shaped by their upbringing in 1950s Georgia and will inevitably be changed by the foreboding and intractable African continent.