Literary Review of Canada 'What a wonderful book! Joan Thomas takes us deep into Operation Auca and into the wild jungle of her characters' hearts. The season's must-read for historical fiction fans.' - Toronto Star 'Five Wives is an engrossing, thoughtful read, and a fresh testament to Thomas's narrative powers - and her ability to locate a human pulse under the often-deafening drumbeats of religious and cultural tradition.' - Winnipeg Free Press 'Joan Thomas eviscerates the myth of the benevolent missionary in this fictionalized account of how evangelicals descended on the Waorani, an Ecuadorean Indigenous community, devastating their culture and lives.' - NOW Magazine 'Thomas's blend of fact and fiction is effective, and her vivid descriptions evoke a distant past, giving readers a glimpse into a bygone era and the patriarchal structures at play. Five Wives is riveting, from start to finish. remarkable feat of imagination puts her in Munro's league.' - The Globe and Mail 'Magnificent. This gorgeous, nuanced retelling offers up historical events in a new light and forces us to ask difficult and timely questions about colonialism, indigeneity, and faith., 'Brilliant, eloquent, curious, far-seeing. What a wonderful book! Joan Thomas takes us deep into Operation Auca and into the wild jungle of her characters' hearts.

Five Wives is a riveting, often wrenching story of evangelism and its legacy, teeming with atmosphere and compelling characters and rich in emotional impact. Five Wives is the fictionalized account of the real-life women who were left behind, and their struggles - with grief, with doubt, and with each other - as they continued to pursue their evangelical mission in the face of the explosion of fame that followed their husbands' deaths. After spending days dropping gifts from an aircraft, the five men in the party rashly entered the 'intangible zone.' They were all killed, leaving their wives and children to fend for themselves. Based on the shocking real-life events In 1956, a small group of evangelical Christian missionaries and their families journeyed to the rainforest in Ecuador intending to convert the Waorani, a people who had never had contact with the outside world. WINNER OF THE GOVERNOR GENERAL'S LITERARY AWARD FOR FICTION In the tradition of The Poisonwood Bible and State of Wonder, a novel set in the rainforest of Ecuador about five women left behind when their missionary husbands are killed.

Five wives joan thomas