What is Americanah about?

Americanah follows Ifemelu, a young Nigerian woman who leaves Lagos for America as a university student and spends fifteen years navigating a country that insists on categorizing her in ways Nigeria never did. The novel opens as she's preparing to return to Lagos — and to reconnect with her first love, Obinze, who himself spent years trying and failing to make a life in England before returning to Nigeria as a wealthy, unhappily married man.

Adichie's central argument is that Ifemelu becomes "Black" only in America. In Nigeria she was Igbo, or middle-class, or clever — but not Black in the American sense. The discovery of American race is the novel's intellectual engine, expressed partly through Ifemelu's blog, "Raceteenth, or Various Observations About American Blacks (Those Formerly Known as Negroes) by a Non-American Black." The blog entries, quoted at length, are among the sharpest writing about American racial dynamics in contemporary fiction — funny, angry, precise, and deliberately addressed to white readers who think they're past all this.

But Americanah is also a love story, and Adichie balances the political observation with genuine emotional weight. The Ifemelu-Obinze relationship is the spine of the novel — a first love interrupted by circumstances, sustained across years and continents by memory and correspondence, and eventually tested by who each has become in the other's absence. Adichie is honest about how time and experience change people, and whether the person you loved at nineteen can be the same person you love at thirty-five.

This is a long novel that reads quickly because Adichie's prose is alive and Ifemelu is enormous fun to be inside. The American sections are funnier and more caustic than the quieter Nigerian sections — Adichie saves her most affectionate writing for Lagos. A warning: the book is so confident in its observations about American race that white readers sometimes experience it as confrontational. That is, to a significant degree, the point.