NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A modern classic about star-crossed lovers that explores questions of race and being Black in America—and the search for what it means to call a place home. • From the award-winning author of We Should All Be Feminists and Half of a Yellow Sun • WITH A NEW INTRODUCTION BY THE AUTHOR "An expansive, epic love story."—O, The Oprah Magazine
One of the New York Times’s100 Best Books of the 21st Century • One of The Atlantic’s Great American Novels of the Past 100 Years
Ifemelu and Obinze are young and in love when they depart military-ruled Nigeria for the West. Beautiful, self-assured Ifemelu heads for America, where despite her academic success, she is forced to grapple with what it means to be Black for the first time. Quiet, thoughtful Obinze had hoped to join her, but with post–9/11 America closed to him, he instead plunges into a dangerous, undocumented life in London.
At once powerful and tender, Americanah is a remarkable novel that is "dazzling…funny and defiant, and simultaneously so wise." —San Francisco Chronicle
Sometimes you just know. It's hard to point out the exact place or sentence you fell in love with a particular novel. It wasn't like that with this book. I know exactly when it happened. Page 14. Ifemelu and Blaine are talking about books that he like:
She had read many of them, because he recommended them, but they were like cotton candy that so easily evaporated from her tongue's memory.
That quote right there was when I knew this book would be special.
I didnt expect this book to be about love at all. Not in the sense that it was at least. It was so tender and fragile. It was beautiful, and to quote the book itself, it was poetic.
Very rarely do you come across a book that challenges your thoughts and views on the world, a book that will change you. This is one of those gems. It will stay with me for a long time, if not forever.
I'll admit I was a bit bored with the storyline in the beginning, but the writing definitely made up for it, and the story picked up soon enough. It's amazing, isn't it, how this novel spans so many years, and yet it's hard to explain exactly what it was about.
The book left me feeling empty and nostalgic. I wanted it to be longer. 600 pages wasn't nearly enough. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is such a great writer, and I'll go check out all her other books for sure.
I'll be buying multiple copies of this one and gift them at Christmas.
