The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver is one of these books, a “modern classic” if you will, which everyone seemed to have read and raved about…except me. I finally caught up and read it recently; having noted a reference to it in a non-fiction book, I was keen to read a novel set in what is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
The novel tells the story of the Price family; father Nathan, an American preacher, takes his wife and four daughters to the Belgian Congo in 1959 on a mission to spread Christianity. The Poisonwood Bible is the story of what happens in the village of Kilanga, and the aftermath over the next three decades.