Americanah

Americanah is a 2013 novel by the Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, published on 14 May 2013 by Alfred A. Knopf. It is her third novel and fourth book, and it won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction in 2013.

As teenagers at a Lagos secondary school, Ifemelu and Obinze fall in love while Nigeria is under military dictatorship and many of their contemporaries are trying to leave the country. Ifemelu departs to study in the United States, and through her studies and relationships she records what race means in American culture. She arrives without that framework and discovers for the first time what it is to be read as a Black person, a realisation the novel returns to repeatedly.

Obinze, the son of a professor, had expected to follow her but is unable to enter the United States and ends up in Britain instead, which gives the book a second immigrant trajectory to weigh against the first. The love story runs underneath the whole structure as the connection between two people who have changed in different countries.