Chapter & Verse: Things Fall Apart

Chinua Achebe built an entire world out of clean, spare sentences, let us live inside its courts and wrestling rings for a hundred pages, and then showed how easily an empire can crush it into an administrative footnote. Around the table, the conversation turns on whether Okonkwo is a tragic hero or an irredeemable bully, why all those chapters about yams are the real foundation of the tragedy, and how a young Nigerian borrowed an Irish poet's line to turn it straight back on the British Empire. It is a sharp, affectionate look at a masterpiece that refuses to flatter its protagonist or indulge its conquerors.