Americanah

A powerful, tender story of race and identity by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, the award-winning author of Half of a Yellow Sun.

Ifemelu and Obinze are young and in love when they depart military-ruled Nigeria for the West. Beautiful, self-assured Ifemelu heads for America, where despite her academic success, she is forced to grapple with what it means to be black for the first time. Quiet, thoughtful Obinze had hoped to join her, but with post-9/11 America closed to him, he instead plunges into a dangerous, undocumented life in London. Fifteen years later, they reunite in a newly democratic Nigeria and reignite their passion—for each other and for their homeland.

Americanah is licensed for publication in 29 languages.

Awards | Distinction

Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction, 2013

Listed among the New York Times Book Review’s “Ten Best Books of 2013”

Winner of The Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize for Fiction, 2013

An NPR “Great Reads” Book, a Washington Post Notable Book, a Seattle Times Best Book, an Entertainment Weekly Top Fiction Book, a Newsday Top 10 Book, and a Goodreads Best of the Year pick

Winner of the “One Book, One New York” campaign, 2017

Praises for Americanah

  • "Part love story, part social critique, and one of the best [novels] you’ll read this year...These characters are richly drawn...When parts of the plot seem familiar — the perils of emigration, the difficulties of being a foreigner in a new land — Adichie digs in deeply, finding a way to make them fresh."

    - Los Angeles Times

  • "Fearless. A towering achievement…From the place of Africans in the race politics in America, to love across continents, Americanah dares to bring us a world of a confident and self-made woman making her way in these complicated times. This is the Africa of our future. Sublime, powerful and the most political of [Adichie’s] novels. She continues to blaze the way forward."

    - Binyavanga Wainaina

  • "Superb...Americanah is that rare thing in contemporary literary fiction: a lush, big-hearted love story that also happens to be a piercingly funny social critique."

    - Vogue

  • "Witheringly trenchant and hugely empathetic...a novel that holds the discomfiting realities of our times fearlessly before us. A steady-handed dissection of the universal human experience."

    - The New York Times Book Review