Purple Hibiscus

But
Purple Hibiscus
is ‘more than a contemporary update on the impact of colonialism in Nigeria’, he adds.
    ‘With writing marked by infinite wisdom and heart-breaking generosity, Adichie draws the African struggle for a modern identity into the heart of family life.’
    The New Statesman’s Michele Roberts considered
Purple Hibiscus
to be ‘in the best tradition of the coming-of-age novel’. With its ‘rich descriptions of physical and domestic environments’ and ‘artful deployment of suspense and drama’, it ‘serves as a reminder of what serious, committed storytelling can do’.
    Writing in the Daily Telegraph, Christopher Hope welcomed Adichie as ‘a fresh new voice out of Africa’. The Observer ’s Hephzibah Anderson admired how she expresses the political in acutely personalterms, telling ‘an intoxicating story that is at once distinctively feminine, African and universal’. The last word must go to Wareing, who hails the ‘balanced yet passionate’ Adichie as ‘an inspirational new voice’, and
Purple Hibiscus
as ‘a book to read at all costs’.
Tiny Wonders
    by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
    THE ROADS ARE full of potholes and the car jolts often. ‘Sorry oh, sorry oh,’ the driver says, as if they are his fault. I know, though, that he is apologizing because I am a stranger now, because I am just back from America and am unused to the bumpy roads. The dust floats in through the open windows to settle on my skin, my eyelashes, and underneath my nails. Motorcycles hurtle past us, honking. Signboards slide past, cluttering the roadside. Most of them were once white and are now tan with years of dust and wind. In front of ramshackle sheds on the roadside, women are bent over smoky roasting basins, fanning corncobs.
    The minute we turn into our street, I realize that our blue two-story house looks the same but that the plants seem faded, somehow; the frangipani trees are not as lush as they have been in my imagination. And our yard is silent, unlike in my childhood when it was alive with the shrieks of us children playing soccer on the lawn, the buzz of the bees around the ixora bushes, the laughter of my parents’ guests on the balcony upstairs, the clucking of the chickens that sauntered around.
    ‘A quaint university town in eastern Nigeria’ is how I described Nsukka to my American friends. A sterile description that did nothing to capture this small, slow town where I grew up, where chicken is a delicacy, where your neighbour is a witch and is responsible for all your illnesses, where young girls want to put on weight and people raise free-range goats that eat the flowersin the yard next door, where life was full of the tiny wonders I tried to capture in my novel
Purple Hibiscus
.
    I am back to spend Christmas with my dad. And I have been home only a few days when he tells me that his friend Professor E. has passed on. I remember the smallish professor of botany who grew saucer-sized roses in his yard. I remember the story that when my parents’ baby died (Chukwuemeka, born 1971, six years before me), it was Professor E. who drove my distraught dad back to our ancestral hometown, Abba, for the burial.
    ‘I’ll go with you to pay condolences,’ I say, and my dad nods, as though he expected that I would anyway.
    As we drive through the campus, I notice that the houses, too, are faded. The rains have whitewashed the light blues and light pinks, window nettings are torn, louvers are missing, hedges have gaping holes. There is not only a shabbiness about it all, but it is a resigned shabbiness – there is no attempt to conceal, to plant bright hibiscuses to draw the eyes away from the moldy walls. Or away from the soil-covered lines that the termites have drawn; those zigzag over the houses, like unwieldy veins, without any sense of direction.
    Near Ikejiani Avenue, I see men – workers, carpenters, and plumbers – standing around a mango tree. They nudge the reddish-orange fruits down with long sticks. There is a small cheer when a mango comes hurtling down. Each man has a fruit in hand, each is chewing enthusiastically,but they all want seconds, and they are still holding sticks and looking up at the tree.
    When we get to E.’s, we do not knock on the front door because it is ajar; we simply walk through. There is a thick notebook on a sidetable, a condolence register. Next to it is a porcelain flower vase.
    ‘
Ngwa
, let’s sign the register,’ my dad says. He writes,