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Introduction

Things Fall Apart is a 1958 English-language novel by Nigerian author Chinua Achebe. It is a staple book in schools throughout Africa and widely read and studied in English-speaking countries around the world. It is seen as the archetypal modern African novel in English, and one of the first African novels written in English to receive global critical acclaim. The title of the novel comes from William Butler Yeats's poem "The Second Coming".^[1] In 2009, Newsweek ranked Things Fall Apart #14 on its list of Top 100 Books: The Meta-List.

The novel concerns the life of Okonkwo, a leader and local wrestling champion in Umofia—a fictional group of nine villages in Nigeria, inhabited by the Igbo ethnic group. It also focuses on his three wives, his children (mainly his oldest son Nwoye and his favorite daughter Ezinma), and the influences of British colonialism and Christian missionaries on his traditional Igbo (archaically "Ibo") community during an unspecified time period in the late nineteenth or early twentieth century.

Things Fall Apart was followed by a sequel, No Longer at Ease (1960), originally written as the second part of a larger work together with Things Fall Apart, and Arrow of God (1964), on a similar subject. Achebe states that his two later novels, A Man of the People (1966) and Anthills of the Savannah (1987), while not featuring Okonkwo's descendants and set in fictional African countries, are spiritual successors to the previous novels in chronicling African history.