AMERICANAH

477 pp., paperback, Reprint, London, (2013) 2017

A novel about teenage sweethearts who go their separate ways when one goes to study in the USA and the other seeks a new life in London, and who meet again in Nigeria many years later.

This novel won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction and The Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize for Fiction.

"There are some novels that tell a great story and others that change the way you look at the world. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Americanah is a book that manages to do both...A deeply felt book, written with equal parts lyricism and erudition. More than that, it is an important book - and yet one that never lets its importance weigh down the need to tell a truly gripping human story." Elizabeth Day, The Observer

"Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is an extraordinarily self-aware thinker and writer, possessing the ability to lambaste society without sneering or patronising or polemicizing. For her, it seems no great feat to balance high-literary intentions with broad social critique. Americanah examines blackness in America, Nigeria and  Britain, but it is also a steady-handed dissection of the universal human experience - a platitude made fresh by Adichie's observations... Americanah is witheringly trenchant and hugely empathetic, both worldy and geographically precise, a novel that holds the discomforting realities of our times fearlessly before us. It never feels false." Mike Peed, The New York Times

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie was born in 1977 and grew up in Nigeria. She is the author of the novels Half of a Yellow Sun (Orange Prize) and Purple Hibiscus (Commonwealth Writers' Prize and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award) and the short story collection The Thing Around Your Neck. A recipient of a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, she divides her time between the United States and Nigeria.