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THE WOMEN’S PRIZE FOR FICTION ‘WINNER OF WINNERS’

CHOSEN AS SERVICE95 BOOK CLUB’S BOOK OF THE MONTH FOR AUGUST 2023

‘A literary masterpiece’
DAILY MAIL

‘An immense achievement’
OBSERVER

‘A gorgeous, pitiless account of love, violence and betrayal’
TIME

In 1960s Nigeria, three lives intersect. Ugwu works as a houseboy for a university professor. Olanna has abandoned her life of privilege in Lagos to live with her charismatic lover, the lecturer. And Richard, a shy Englishman, is in thrall to Olanna’s enigmatic twin sister. Amongst the horror of Nigeria’s civil war, loyalties are tested as they are pulled apart and thrown together in ways none of them imagined.

Winner of the Women’s Prize for Fiction, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s masterpiece is a novel about race, class and the end of colonialism – and the ways in which love can complicate everything.

‘Vividly written, thrumming with life … a remarkable novel’ Joyce Carol Oates

‘Adichie entwines love and politics to a degree rarely achieved by novelists’ Elle

‘Absolutely awesome. One of the best books I’ve ever read’ Judy Finnigan

Publisher Review

'Vividly written, thrumming with life...a remarkable novel. In its compassionate intelligence as in its capacity for intimate portraiture, this novel is a worthy successor to such twentieth-century classics as Chinua Achebe's "Things Fall Apart" and V. S. Naipaul's "A Bend in the River".' Joyce Carol Oates 'Here is a new writer endowed with the gift of ancient storytellers.' Chinua Achebe 'I look with awe and envy at this young woman from Africa who is recording the history of her country. She is fortunate - and we, her readers, are even luckier.' Edmund White 'Absolutely awesome. One of the best books I've ever read.' Judy Finnigan '[Deserves] a place alongside such works as Pat Barker's "Regeneration" trilogy and Helen Dunmore's depiction of the Leningrad blockade, "The Siege".' Guardian