In 1959, Nathan Price, a evangelical Baptist from Georgia, takes his family to the Belgian Congo. He is filled with a fierce and misguided mission to rescue each and every heathen African child from a life without Jesus. It is the eve of Independence in the Congo, and this family, who brings everything, but 'all the wrong things,' is unequivocally unprepared for life in a remote and tropical African village. The alternating narrators are the long-suffering wife of the preacher and their four daughters - a vacuous teen who speaks in malapropisms and advertising slogans, a pair of brilliant twins with the opposite insights of humanitarian lightness and empirical darkness, and a pre-schooler whose exuberant Christian innocence makes her the favoured playmate of the village children.

Each of the Price women tell their own deeply personal story - of wife, mother, daughter, sister, twin, child and Christian reckoning - against the contradictory and overwhelming backdrop of post-colonial Africa. All the great African themes are there: Western ignorance of African history, politics, languages and traditional beliefs, the wreckage left in the wake of colonialism, African Christianity, racism, tropical disease, dangerous nature, the covert CIA operation to murder the a democratic liberator and replace him with a west-friendly despot, truth, justice, hope and reconciliation. This is a big novel, and Kingsolver treats her grist with humour, humanity and insight.

It is no accident that Nathan Price has no voice in this novel, he is the centre of the storm in a historical parable; he plays the role of the American government that pulled its citizens into guilt and culpability for actions they had no say in. Kingsolver has done her political, social and cultural research well, and it is delightfully clear where she stands on the issues.

In many African languages, the noun for 'being' includes both the living and the formerly living; this is a world where ancestors live among their descendants, unseen but very much involved with the daily affairs of their families. And while the Price family is utterly defeated by Africa, they are all survivors, for better or worse, in the end. Two survivors are dead and four live on to finish the story; two escape back to America and four stay behind in Africa; and welcome or not, be they ignorant or insightful, penitent or indicted, Africa lives on in all of them.