Recommendations
Books Like Americanah
Novels Like Americanah
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Americanah is one of the great immigration and identity novels — Ifemelu discovering race in America, Obinze's undocumented life in England, and the question of what home means when you've remade yourself somewhere else. These 8 novels share its intelligence about how identities are constructed and reconstructed, its transatlantic scope, and its refusal to simplify the experience of the modern African diaspora.
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Half of a Yellow Sun
by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Twin sisters and the Biafran War — the essential companion to Americanah in Adichie's work; where Americanah moves outward from Nigeria to the diaspora, Half of a Yellow Sun moves inward into one of the most defining traumas of Nigerian history; together they bracket Adichie's portrait of what it means to be Nigerian across different historical moments
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Open City
by Teju Cole
Julius, a Nigerian-German psychiatry resident, walking through post-9/11 New York and Brussels — Cole's debut novel shares Americanah's portrait of an educated African man navigating Western cities with the double consciousness of the immigrant intellectual, its meditative rather than plotted structure, and its interest in how race and nationality intersect for someone who inhabits multiple cultural identities simultaneously
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Swing Time
by Zadie Smith
Two mixed-race girls from a London council estate, one of whom becomes a pop star's assistant in Africa — Smith's fifth novel shares Americanah's interest in the complicated feelings of an African or African-diaspora woman who has achieved success in the West while remaining uneasily connected to the continent she came from, and its portrait of friendship as a site of class and identity negotiation
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A Tale of Two Cities
by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Adichie's essay collection Dear Ijeawele, or A Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions — not a novel but the clearest statement of the feminist politics that inform Americanah's portrait of Ifemelu; recommended for readers who want to understand Adichie's thinking about gender, race, and feminism in the context that her fiction explores
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The Reluctant Fundamentalist
by Mohsin Hamid
Changez, a Pakistani Princeton graduate working at a New York valuation firm, telling his story to an American stranger in Lahore after 9/11 — Hamid's novel shares Americanah's portrait of an exceptionally able non-white person in America whose success coexists with a growing awareness of the racial and political conditions of that success, and the moment of crisis at which they can no longer ignore those conditions
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White Teeth
by Zadie Smith
The Joneses and the Iqbals in multiracial North London across fifty years — Smith's debut shares Americanah's delight in the social comedy of the immigrant experience and its interest in what it means to be simultaneously insider and outsider in Western society; where Adichie focuses on a Nigerian woman's experience of American race, Smith gives a panoramic portrait of British multiculturalism across generations
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The Interpreter
by Wole Soyinka
Five Nigerian intellectuals in 1960s Lagos, their conversations and lives — Soyinka's 1965 novel is the great modernist Nigerian novel of the generation before Adichie, and its portrait of educated Nigerians navigating the gap between their intellectual formation and the social reality of their country is the precursor to the world Americanah depicts; recommended for readers who want historical context for the Nigerian intellectual milieu Ifemelu comes from
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NoViolet Bulawayo: We Need New Names
by NoViolet Bulawayo
Darling, a young Zimbabwean girl, and her journey from her collapsing country to America — Bulawayo's Booker Prize-shortlisted debut shares Americanah's African-to-America immigrant story, its portrait of what America looks like from the outside and how it feels from the inside, and its interest in the specific social performance required of African women who want to be legible in American society
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