Purple Hibiscus

Purple Hibiscus is the first novel of the Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, published in 2003. It appeared in the United States in October of that year and in Britain and Nigeria in the years that followed.

Kambili is fifteen, and her father is a figure the whole town admires: a successful businessman who gives money to the church, supports his relatives and publishes a newspaper that criticises the government. In his own house he is a different man, and his insistence on devotion and discipline is enforced with beatings that his wife and children have learned to arrange their lives around. Kambili has no vocabulary for what happens at home until she and her brother are sent to stay with their aunt, whose household is poor, loud and free, and whose garden contains the purple hibiscus of the title. At that point the novel becomes a story about what a child does with the knowledge that her family is not what everyone believes it to be, and about the political situation outside the house, which is also becoming more dangerous.

Adichie wrote the book partly in response to the picture of Nigeria she had seen in earlier fiction, and the novel deals with religious intolerance and with what the country inherited from its colonial past.