WINNER 2013 – National Book Critics Circle Award for FictionFINALIST 2014 – Baileys Women’s Prize for FictionFINALIST 2014 – Andrew Carnegie Medal for FictionLONGLISTED...
WINNER 2013 – National Book Critics Circle Award for FictionFINALIST 2014 – Baileys Women’s Prize for FictionFINALIST 2014 – Andrew Carnegie Medal for FictionLONGLISTED...
Due to publisher restrictions, your digital library cannot purchase additional copies of this title. We apologize if there is a long holds list. You may want to see if other editions of this title are available from your digital library instead.
Due to publisher restrictions, your digital library cannot purchase additional copies of this title. We apologize if there is a long holds list. You may want to see if other editions of this title are available from your digital library instead.
Description-
WINNER 2013 – National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction FINALIST 2014 – Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction FINALIST 2014 – Andrew Carnegie Medal for Fiction LONGLISTED 2015 – International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award
A searing new novel, at once sweeping and intimate, by the award-winning author of Half of a Yellow Sun: a story of love and race centered around a man and woman from Nigeria who seemed destined to be together—until the choices they are forced to make tear them apart.
Ifemelu—beautiful, self-assured—left Nigeria 15 years ago, and now studies in Princeton as a Graduate Fellow. She seems to have fulfilled every immigrant's dream: Ivy League education; success as a writer of a wildly popular political blog; money for the things she needs. But what came before is more like a nightmare: wrenching departure from family; humiliating jobs under a false name. She feels for the first time the weight of something she didn't think about back home: race.
Obinze—handsome and kind-hearted—was Ifemelu's teenage love; he'd hoped to join her in America, but post 9/11 America wouldn't let him in. Obinze's journey leads him to back alleys of illegal employment in London; to a fake marriage for the sake of a work card, and finally, to a set of handcuffs as he is exposed and deported.
Years later, when they reunite in Nigeria, neither is the same person who left home. Obinze is the kind of successful "Big Man" he'd scorned in his youth, and Ifemelu has become an "Americanah"—a different version of her former self, one with a new accent and attitude. As they revisit their shared passion—for their homeland and for each other—they must face the largest challenges of their lives.
Spanning three continents, entering the lives of a richly drawn cast of characters across numerous divides, Americanah is a riveting story of love and expectation set in today's globalized world.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's work has appeared in various publications, including The New Yorker, Granta and Zoetrope. She is the author of The Thing Around Your Neck and of 2 novels, Purple Hibiscus and Half of a Yellow Sun, which won the Orange Prize and was a NBCC Finalist. A recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, she divides her time between the United States and Nigeria.
Reviews-
Starred review from March 25, 2013 Adichie burst onto the literary scene in 2006 with Half of a Yellow Sun, her searing depiction of the civil war in Nigeria. Her equally compelling and important new novel follows the lives of that country’s postwar generation as they suffer endemic corruption and poverty under a military dictatorship. An unflinching but compassionate observer, Adichie writes a vibrant tale about love, betrayal, and destiny; about racism; and about a society in which honesty is extinct and cynicism is the national philosophy. She broadens her canvas to include both America and England, where she illuminates the precarious tightrope existence of culturally and racially displaced immigrants. The friendship of Ifemelu and Obinze begins in secondary school in Lagos and blossoms into love. When Ifemelu earns a scholarship to an American college, Obinze intends to join her after his university graduation, but he’s denied a U.S. visa. He manages to get to London where his plight is typical of illegal immigrants there: he uses another man’s ID so he can find menial, off-the-grid work, with the attendant loss of dignity and self-respect. The final blow comes when he’s arrested and deported home. Ifemelu, meanwhile, faces the same humiliations, indignities, and privations—first in New York, then in Philadelphia. There, attending college, she’s unable to find a job and descends to a degrading sexual act in order to pay her rent. Later she becomes a babysitter for a wealthy white family and begins writing a provocative blog on being black in America that bristles with sharp, incisive observations about racism. Ifemelu writes that the painful, expensive process of “relaxing” kinky African hair to conform to cultural expectations brings black women dangerously close to self-hatred. In time the blog earns Ifemelu fame and a fellowship to Princeton, where she has love affairs with a wealthy white man and, later, an African-American Yale professor. Her decision to return home to Nigeria (where she risks being designated as an affected “Americanah”) is the turning point of the novel’s touching love story and an illuminating portrait of a country still in political turmoil. Announced first printing of 60,000. Agent: Sarah Chalfant, the Wylie Agency.
Janet Maslin, The New York Times Book ReviewWINNER 2013 –National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction FINALIST 2014 – Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction FINALIST 2014 – Andrew Carnegie Medal for Fiction SHORTLIST 2015 – International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award
"Americanah is most memorable for its fine-tuned, scathing observations about worldly Nigerians and the ways they create new identities out of pretension and aspiration.... Adichie displays much keen critical intelligence about how we can unwittingly betray our truest selves."
O, The Oprah Magazine
"Masterful.... An expansive, epic love story set in three countries, Adichie's fourth book pulls no punches with regard to race, class, and the high-risk, heart-tearing struggle for belonging in a fractured world."
Vogue
"Superb.... A lush, big-hearted love story that also happens to be a piercingly funny social critique."
Daily Mail
"'You can't write an honest novel about race in this country,' comments a character towards the end of Americanah. It's a slyly self-referential joke since, with her ambitious third novel, prize-winning author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie sets out to prove otherwise, placing race squarely, unapologetically and entertainingly centre-stage...Written with flair and warmth, this impressively poised novel makes the most of Adichie's sense of wry detachment as an outsider without losing an affectionate humour for both her native Nigeria and adopted country."
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