Reading Order
Things Fall Apart Reading Order
Things Fall Apart (1958) by Chinua Achebe is the most widely read African novel and the founding work of modern African literature in English — the story of Okonkwo, a great warrior and leader in the Igbo village of Umuofia, whose world is transformed and eventually destroyed by the arrival of Christian missionaries and British colonial administration. Achebe wrote the novel explicitly as a response to the Africa of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness and Joyce Cary's Mister Johnson — African novels that depicted the continent from the outside, without giving African characters interiority, voice, or the dignity of a fully human consciousness. By rendering Okonkwo's world from the inside — its values, its rituals, its debates, its humor, and its tragedies — Achebe established the model for African novelists who followed him and made Things Fall Apart one of the most translated and most studied novels of the twentieth century.
Where to start
Things Fall Apart (1958) — the complete novel; no prequel required. Achebe's other novels (No Longer at Ease, Arrow of God, A Man of the People, Anthills of the Savannah) form a loose sequence but can each be read independently
Complete Things Fall Apart Book List
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Things Fall Apart
Chinua Achebe·1958
Things Fall Apart — Frequently Asked Questions
What is Things Fall Apart about?
Things Fall Apart is set in the Igbo village of Umuofia in what is now southeastern Nigeria, in the late nineteenth century just before and during the first contact with British colonialism. Its protagonist is Okonkwo, a powerful man who has risen from his father's failure to become one of the most respected warriors and farmers in the clan. The first two-thirds of the novel follow Okonkwo's life within the traditional Igbo world — its social structures, religious practices, festivals, and debates. The final third shows the arrival of Christian missionaries and British administration and the slow, irreversible transformation of the world that Okonkwo was formed by. Okonkwo's response to this transformation — violent resistance — and its consequences form the novel's tragic conclusion.
Is Things Fall Apart hard to read?
No. Things Fall Apart is one of the most accessible major novels of the twentieth century — it is short (under 200 pages), direct in its narrative, clear in its prose, and written (in Achebe's own formulation) so that even a child can read it. Achebe rejected the Conradian or modernist obscurity that had been the hallmark of the African novel as written by Europeans, because he wanted to write a novel that African readers could recognize their world in. The difficulty of Things Fall Apart is not linguistic but moral and cultural: Achebe requires readers to understand Okonkwo's world on its own terms before it is destroyed, so the novel's tragedy is the tragedy of a genuine civilization, not just of one man.
What does the title Things Fall Apart mean?
The title comes from W.B. Yeats's 1919 poem 'The Second Coming': 'Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; / Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.' Achebe uses Yeats's words to frame what happens to the Igbo world when British colonialism arrives: the center — the set of beliefs, practices, and social structures that held Umuofia together — cannot hold against the new power, and what had been a stable, self-governing society falls apart. The irony is that Yeats was writing about the disorder that Western civilization was descending into after the First World War — Achebe reclaims the image for the disorder that Western civilization was imposing on African societies at the same time it was destroying itself.
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