Things Fall Apart

A 1958 novel set in the Igbo village of Umuofia in the late nineteenth century, following the rise and fall of Okonkwo, a respected farmer and wrestler undone by his own rigidity as British colonial administration and Christian missionaries arrive and unsettle the community's institutions. Written in English but carrying Igbo proverbs, oral storytelling patterns and vocabulary throughout, it was a deliberate answer to European fiction's prior portrayals of Africa, presenting a fully realized precolonial society on its own terms rather than as backdrop, and it became the most widely read novel in modern African literature.