Things Fall Apart
1958 · 209 pages
Okonkwo is a wrestler and a hard man in an Igbo village, terrified of resembling his gentle, indebted father, when the missionaries arrive. Achebe builds a whole world before letting it come apart.
★ 8.9
The Books canon
Sourced and shelved.
Every book chosen by hand and annotated for why it matters.
Browse all 1,178 books or filter by subject, era, place, and author.
Browse all 1,178 books or filter by subject, era, place, and author.
Midnight's Children
1981 · 560 pages
Saleem Sinai is born at the exact midnight India becomes independent, which gives him telepathy and welds his life to the country's. Sixty years of history arrive as one unreliable, delighted confession.
★ 8.7
This Earth of Mankind
1980 · 368 pages
Minke, a Javanese student under Dutch rule, loves the daughter of a concubine running the estate its Dutch owner cannot. Indonesia banned it for a generation and now claims it as its greatest.
★ 6.8
The God of Small Things
1997 · 333 pages
Twin brother and sister in Kerala watch their divorced mother fall in love with Velutha, a carpenter of the untouchable caste. Roy hands you the catastrophe first and then makes you understand it.
★ 6.7
Black Skin, White Masks
1952 · 206 pages
A white child points and cries, Look, a Negro. Fanon takes that instant apart to show racism lodged in the skin itself, and half a century of Black thought has worked from it.
★ 6.6
Season of Migration to the North
1966 · 169 pages
Mustafa Sa'eed sailed north to London and left ruined Englishwomen behind him, an African answer to Conrad's Heart of Darkness. Arab writers voted it the century's most important novel in Arabic.
★ 6.4
Decolonising the Mind
The Politics of Language in African Literature
1986 · 114 pages
Ngugi's schoolmasters caned children for speaking Gikuyu, or hung a plate around their necks reading I AM STUPID. Empire takes the mind through language, he argues, and he abandoned English for his fiction.
★ 6.2
A Small Place
1988 · 96 pages
You arrive in Antigua as a tourist and Kincaid tells you what you look like to the people who live there, then turns on the empire and the government that wrecked the island.
★ 6.2
So Long a Letter
1981 · 96 pages
Widowed after thirty years, a Senegalese teacher writes to her closest friend about the husband who took her daughter's teenage friend as a second wife. It won the first Noma Award.
★ 6.1
The House of the Spirits
1982 · 433 pages
Clara predicts the future and moves furniture without touching it, while three generations of her family reach from the era of the great estates to the 1973 coup that comes for them.
★ 5.7