Things Fall Apart

Things Fall Apart is a must read book for anyone, this is a book that appears on every greatest book of all time  and is heralded by many as the archetypal, perhaps prototypical, novel in English about the African experience of colonial rule. 

Achebe’s writing style would be reason enough to read this novel. He is simultaneously lyrically and spare. There isn’t a single extraneous word and yet it is not remotely spartan. It is instead a forceful description of a superstitious, oftentimes opaque, world. Although written in English it is shot through with the idiomatic, proverbial structures of the Igbo dialect that Achebe references at the outset. 

Through the eyes of the protagonist we are given a window to view the richness of igbo culture, not romanticised, sanctified or glamorised but instead laid bare with shockingly brutal, casually cruel injustices. 

The veracity allows all readers to feel something of what it must be like for your thousand-year-old culture and customs to come under sustained, oftentimes pernicious, assault, in the name of “civilisation”. 

This is a rightly celebrated book that captures you and your imagination long after you put it down.