Recommendations
Books Like Things Fall Apart
Best books to read after Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
Achebe's 1958 masterpiece follows Okonkwo in the Igbo village of Umuofia before and during the arrival of British colonialism, giving African life the interiority and dignity that European writing about Africa denied it. These recommendations extend the experience through Achebe's other novels, through African literature that followed in his tradition, and through fiction that engages with colonialism, the encounter between tradition and modernity, and the destruction of indigenous worlds.
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No Longer at Ease
by Chinua Achebe
Achebe's 1960 sequel — the story of Obi Okonkwo, the grandson of Okonkwo in Things Fall Apart, now a young civil servant in post-independence Lagos. No Longer at Ease shows what happens to the generation after Okonkwo's: the educated young Nigerians who were supposed to inherit the independence that colonialism denied, and who are destroyed by a different combination of corruption, tradition, and modernity from the one that destroyed their grandfather.
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Arrow of God
by Chinua Achebe
Achebe's 1964 novel — set in the 1920s, following Ezeulu, the chief priest of Ulu in the Igbo village of Umuaro, whose conflict with British colonial administration and his own community destroys him. Arrow of God is the most psychologically complex of Achebe's novels and the most direct engagement with the mechanisms of colonial power at the village level — a necessary companion to Things Fall Apart that shows the colonialism's impact in its second generation.
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Heart of Darkness
by Joseph Conrad
The novel Achebe explicitly wrote Things Fall Apart in response to — Conrad's 1899 account of Marlow's journey up the Congo, in which Africa is used as a psychological backdrop for a European spiritual journey while its people are denied humanity and voice. Reading Heart of Darkness alongside Things Fall Apart is the clearest possible illustration of what Achebe meant by the European literary representation of Africa — and what the alternative looks like when Africa speaks for itself.
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Weep Not, Child
by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o
The first East African novel published in English (1964) — the story of Njoroge, a Kenyan boy who hopes that education will give him and his family a way out of colonial poverty, and whose dreams are destroyed by the Mau Mau uprising and its suppression. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o is Achebe's closest peer among the first generation of African writers in English, and Weep Not, Child's portrait of colonial Kenya is the East African companion to Achebe's portrait of colonial Nigeria.
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Season of Migration to the North
by Tayeb Salih
Salih's 1966 Sudanese masterpiece — the story of Mustafa Sa'eed, who goes to England for an education and becomes a destroyer of women before returning to Sudan, told by an unnamed narrator who must decide what to do with the story he has uncovered. Season of Migration to the North is the Arab African companion to Things Fall Apart: a novel about what colonialism does to the colonized from the inside — the self-destruction it produces when internalized.
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A Grain of Wheat
by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o
Ngũgĩ's 1967 novel — set in Kenya in the week before independence, as the village of Thabai prepares to celebrate and each of its people reckons with their own actions during the Mau Mau Emergency. A Grain of Wheat is Ngũgĩ's most formally complex novel, using shifting time and multiple perspectives to examine what the struggle for independence cost and what independence actually delivered — the African companion to Things Fall Apart in examining the transition from colonial to post-colonial life.
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Half of a Yellow Sun
by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Adichie's 2006 masterpiece — set during the Nigerian Civil War (1967–1970) between the federal government and the breakaway Republic of Biafra. Half of a Yellow Sun is the most direct literary heir to Achebe's work — Adichie has called Achebe her literary father — and it continues his project of rendering Nigerian life from the inside with the full moral complexity and human dignity that European writing about Africa denied. The Biafran War's connection to Igbo identity makes the novel a particular companion to Things Fall Apart.
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Americanah
by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Adichie's 2013 novel — Ifemelu's journey from Nigeria to America and back, and the experience of being a black African woman in the United States. Where Things Fall Apart is about the destruction of one world by colonial power, Americanah is about the navigation of multiple worlds (Nigerian, American, race-conscious, class-conscious) in the post-colonial present — both are portraits of what it means to be formed by a specific culture and then encounter a world that assigns you a different identity.
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