Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's first novel is set in postcolonial Nigeria and told by Kambili Achike, a teenage girl growing up in a household run on fear. Her father, Eugene, is a wealthy newspaper publisher celebrated in public as a voice for democracy against a military government, and at home a violent religious authoritarian whose Catholicism governs every hour of his children's lives. The gap between the man the country admires and the man his family lives with is the ground the book stands on.
Kambili narrates in a voice that is watchful and constrained, which is part of the novel's method: what she cannot say aloud, and often cannot let herself think, shapes how the story reaches the reader. The domestic material sits inside a wider political frame — a country under military rule, a press under pressure, and a family whose privilege does not protect it from either.
The book won the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Best First Book. It was shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction and longlisted for the Booker Prize, an unusual reception for a debut and the point at which Adichie's name entered wide circulation. She went on to write Half of a Yellow Sun and Americanah, and readers who come to her through those later books often work backwards to this one, where the concerns of her fiction — faith, family authority, the private cost of public reputation, Nigeria's recent past — are already fully present.
This is the Fourth Estate paperback in English. It is stocked here as general fiction rather than for any Sri Lankan connection; the setting and subject are Nigerian throughout.
It is a good choice for readers of literary fiction who want a novel that works as a family story and as a political one at the same time, and for anyone reading contemporary African writing in English. It is also widely set for study at school and university level, where the narration, the treatment of religion and the postcolonial setting all give students something to work with. Readers should know that the domestic violence in the book is described directly and is central to the plot, not incidental to it.
- Author: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
- Published: 2005
- Language: English
- Pages: 336
- ISBN: 0007189885
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