The best books combine clever ideas with a cracking story

Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is a wonderful and above all a CLEVER writer. I have read both her previous books, 'Purple Hibiscus' and 'Half A Yellow Sun' and enjoyed them enormously. In 'Americanah' she tackles the even more ambitious grenade of a subject that is race. In fact I am tempted to mix my metaphors (slightly) and call it a minefield. Yet Adichie, equipped with the credentials of being a stunningly beautiful black woman in possession of an enormous and observant brain, is more than up to the task. Indeed, the finely nuanced and sometimes cruelly blunt observations that she makes about attitudes arising from differences in skin colour - from comical misunderstandings to sheer blind prejudice - took my breath away.

She also tells a cracking story. For, as E M Forster so famously put it, through gritted teeth I always feel: 'Yes, oh dear yes, the novel tells a story'. In this regard 'Americanah is a tale of love in the finest tradition, tracking the lives of two people who should be together but who, through a combination of bad luck and bad decisions, get separated.

Does it end happily? You will have to read 'Americanah' to find out. It is a long book, but well worth the effort, not just for its illuminations on a difficult and topical subject, but for the pleasure as a reader of surrendering to a fiction writer at the top of her game.



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