Chimamanda Adichie's Reading List

"Before I read Achebe as a child in Nigeria, I read only foreign children’s books, and so I wrote about the same things I was reading – all my characters were White and the stories were set in England or a generic Westernised country. I had not read books that featured people like me, so I thought that books couldn’t include people like me. Until I discovered Achebe. I didn’t realise it at the time, of course – I was too young to be consciously aware of that sort of thing – but later I would r..."

"I have always been drawn to fiction that is written in sublime language and looks at the world through a romantic-realist lens, and this book does just that. It is the story of a White family in New Orleans, in the American South, and their Black servant; a story of race and love and family and dreams. It is filled with longing, melancholy and nostalgia, and it is so atmospheric, so hauntingly described, that the reader never quite emerges from the book."

"This is a humourous, irreverent and unabashedly political novel; it is an enraged lament about post-colonial Africa and how the leaders who inherited supposedly independent countries went on to fail their citizens. Some leaders are closely modelled on real characters – Mobutu of Zaire and Lumumba of the Congo are impossible to miss. The simplified summary of Kourouma: Colonialism has spawned monsters in the name of African leaders, and the West is the creator of these Frankensteins. The narra..."

"Turgenev said that he could not ‘sweeten his characters with syrup,’ that he had to tell the truth, even at the expense of his own sympathies. I loved this book as a teenager and have never forgotten how completely absorbed I was by Turgenev’s wonderfully evocative world."