Kingsolver's 1998 novel follows a Baptist missionary who drags his wife and four daughters into the Belgian Congo on the eve of its independence, then watches his certainties rot in the heat. Told in rotating voices by the five women, it braids domestic catastrophe into the larger crime of Western interference, from Patrice Lumumba's assassination to the long American shadow over Mobutu's Congo. An Oprah's Book Club pick and Pulitzer finalist, it became the book that moved Kingsolver from regional favorite to major American novelist. Its lasting argument is about guilt and reckoning: who pays for what their fathers and their countries did.

The case for it, the case against, and the rest of the canon open with Pro.