In much the same way, as a biologist and former science writer and journalist, she aspires to tell people in plain English about science. Yet although she says books belong to their readers, she clearly hopes to communicate her political views in the palatable form of page-turners. The broad appeal of her story of a mother and daughters may owe something to its faint echoes of Louisa May Alcott's Little Women (loved by Kingsolver as a child) or The Joy Luck Club, the bestselling novel by Amy Tan with whom Kingsolver has played keyboards in a charity rock band, the Rock Bottom Remainders, alongside Stephen King and Carl Hiaasen. All her later novels have made the New York Times bestseller list. The Poisonwood Bible, which was her fourth novel, sold more than four million copies, was chosen for Oprah Winfrey's book club and was voted an all-time favourite of reading groups in Britain. How we feel about that is the question in the book." We've inherited this history of terrible things done, that enriched us in the US and Europe by pillaging the former colonies. For Kingsolver, it is an "allegory of the captive witness. The story is told through the voices of his wife and four daughters, who are "occupied as if by a foreign power", and implicated in his pursuits without ever having chosen them. As an American Baptist missionary drags his family to the Belgian Congo (later Zaire), his bullying evangelism is paralleled by cold-war jockeying for mineral wealth, amid plagues of ants and floods, lethal green mamba bites and blood diamonds smuggled from breakaway Katanga.
It took another decade before Kingsolver combined her childhood memories of place with her later awareness of history, in a far-reaching parable of responsibility and redemption, The Poisonwood Bible (1998).
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