Achebe Arrow of God Reading Order

Chinua Achebe's Arrow of God (1964) is the third of his novels set in Igboland and the one that many scholars and readers consider his greatest — a tragedy of power, culture, and catastrophic misunderstanding set in the 1920s in the village of Umuaro. At its center is Ezeulu, the chief priest of Ulu, the god who holds the six villages of Umuaro together, a man of intelligence and pride who finds himself caught between the pressures of the British colonial administration, the ambitions of a rival god's priest, and the expectations of his own people. Achebe structures the novel with the tragic inevitability of the Greek form he explicitly invokes: Ezeulu cannot compromise his priestly authority even when that rigidity becomes the instrument of catastrophe. Arrow of God is a deeper, more complex, and more formally accomplished work than Things Fall Apart, and represents Achebe at his full maturity.