Americanah

by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Left Nigeria. Learned she was Black in America.

For you if

you want to understand race as something America imposes rather than something people simply are

⚡ Choose Your Route ⚡

Not sold directly on this site. Support indie bookstores with a new copy, or go sustainable with a used one.

Buy New on Bookshop.org

Supports independent bookstores

— OR —

Find Used on Better World Books

Secondhand & sustainable

$19 MSRP
Reference price shown. Other editions may be available.

Ifemelu grows up in Lagos without thinking of herself as Black. She moves to America for university and discovers that here, race is a category she cannot opt out of. Adichie uses that experience — the outsider seeing American racism with fresh eyes — to write one of the sharpest dispatches about race in America ever produced. Also a love story. Also a portrait of contemporary Lagos. Also a meditation on what it means to return home after you've been changed by elsewhere.

Where This Book Lives

Setting: Nigeria • North America
Voice: Written by a Nigerian author
Themes: immigration and belonging race in america

Related Viewing

Shares a topic, theme, or setting with this book in the catalog.

Half of a Yellow Sun(2013)

dir. Biyi Bandele

Twin sisters, one war, two impossible choices.

Twin sisters from a wealthy Nigerian family take very different paths in newly independent 1960s Nigeria, until the outbreak of the Biafran War forces politics into every corner of their private lives. Adapted from Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's novel.

Why it’s here: Punk in refusing to let romance and betrayal upstage the Biafran genocide it's actually about — political catastrophe and private life collapse into each other. Pedagogical in showing how independence's promise curdled into ethnic war within a single generation.

Letterboxd ↗

Same pattern, different era

Different time, different place. The same thing keeps happening.

The White Boy Shuffle

Paul Beatty