Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe

For March we’ll go to a new continent and read a book by the Nigerian author Chinua Achebe. Things Fall Apart is the first of three novels in Achebe's critically acclaimed African Trilogy. It is a classic narrative about Africa's encounter with Europe as it establishes a colonial presence on the continent. Told through the fictional experiences of Okonkwo, a wealthy and fearless Igbo warrior of Umuofia in the late 1800s, Things Fall Apart explores one man's futile resistance to the devaluing of his Igbo traditions by British political and religious forces and his despair as his community capitulates to the powerful new order.

With more than twenty million copies sold and translated into fifty-seven languages, Things Fall Apart provides one of the most illuminating and permanent monuments to African experience. Achebe does not only capture life in a pre-colonial African village, he conveys the tragedy of the loss of that world while broadening our understanding of our contemporary realities.
“African literature is incomplete and unthinkable without the works of Chinua Achebe.” —Toni Morrison

"A magical writer—one of the greatest of the twentieth century." —Margaret Atwood

Named one of America's most-loved novels by PBS’s The Great American Read