As teenagers in a Lagos secondary school, Ifemelu and Obinze fall in love. Nigeria is under military dictatorship, and people are leaving the country if they can. Ifemelu—beautiful, self-assured— departs for America to study. She suffers defeats and triumphs, finds and loses relationships and friendships, all the while feeling the weight of something she never thought of back home: race. Obinze—the quiet, thoughtful son of a professor—had hoped to join her, but post-9/11 America will not let him in, and he plunges into a  dangerous, undocumented life in London. Fifteen years later, Obinze is a wealthy man in a newly democratic Nigeria, while Ifemelu has achieved success as a writer of an eye-opening blog about race in America. But when Ifemelu returns to Nigeria, and she and Obinze reignite their shared passion for their homeland and for each other, they will face the toughest decisions of their lives. Spanning three continents and numerous lives, Americanah is a richly told story set in today’s globalized world.

 

‘Adichie has created a kaleidoscopic work that looks at race from all angles: the formal ingenuity of the blog posts cleverly licenses her Kundera-like mini-essays, each of which enriches the themes of the narrative, and her particular perspective on being black in  America is full of new insight and great wisdom.’ The Telegraph

 

‘Americanah is witheringly trenchant and hugely empathetic, both worldly and geographically precise, a novel that holds the discomfiting realities of our times fearlessly before us. It never feels false.’ The New York Times Book Review

 

‘[Adichie] is so funny and defiant, and simultaneously so wise, that Americanah is an exhilarating, mind-expanding   pleasure of a read. It is a brilliant treatise on race, class and globalization, and also a deep, clear-eyed story about love—and how it can both  demand and make possible the struggle to become our most authentic selves.’ San Francisco Chronicle

 

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie was born in Nigeria. Her novel Half of a Yellow Sun won the Orange Prize and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and her novel Purple Hibiscus won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and theHurston/Wright Legacy Award. The Thing Around Your Neck, her collection of stories, was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best Book in Africa. The recipient of a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, she was named one of the twenty most important fiction writers today under 40 years old by The New Yorker.