Americanah (Easton Press Signed Collector's Edition)

ADICHIE, Chimamanda Ngozi. Americanah. Norwalk, Connecticut: The Easton Press, 2016.

8vo. Full red leather. Spine with raised bands, 22-carat gilt accents. All edges gilt. Moiré silk endpapers. Satin ribbon page marker. 477 pp. Signed Collector's Edition. Signed by the author on the special signature page. Includes signed Certificate of Authenticity and edition card. Originally published New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2013.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (b. 1977) grew up in Nsukka, in southeastern Nigeria, in the house on the University of Nigeria campus where Chinua Achebe had previously lived — a biographical detail that carries the entire weight of a literary inheritance. She studied at the University of Nigeria before moving to the United States for her undergraduate degree, then completed postgraduate degrees at Johns Hopkins and Yale. Her debut novel Purple Hibiscus (2003) won the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Best First Book. Half of a Yellow Sun (2006) won the Orange Prize for Fiction. Her TED talks — The Danger of a Single Story (2009) and We Should All Be Feminists (2012) — have been watched hundreds of millions of times and translated into dozens of languages. She is among the most widely read and most frequently cited writers in the world.

Americanah, published in 2013, won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction and was named one of the ten best books of the year by the New York Times. It has since been translated into more than thirty languages and adapted as a television series for Amazon Prime Video, with Uzodinma Iweala adapting the script and Lupita Nyong'o producing and starring.

The novel follows two Nigerians, Ifemelu and Obinze, whose lives intersect and diverge across three continents over more than a decade. Ifemelu leaves Nigeria for the United States on a university scholarship and discovers, on arrival, that she has become Black — not as a description she would have applied to herself at home, where the categories that structure American racial experience do not apply, but as the category into which the world she has arrived in immediately places her. She becomes a blogger writing about race in America from the perspective of a non-American Black woman, and the blog posts — sharp, funny, precise, furious — punctuate and illuminate the novel's narrative. Obinze, meanwhile, cannot get a visa to the United States after September 11 and goes to England instead, where he lives illegally, doing manual labour, until he is deported back to Nigeria, where he eventually becomes wealthy and respectable and entirely unfulfilled.

The novel's central argument is that race is a social construct that nonetheless structures every human interaction in the societies it has organised, and that the most accurate way to understand this is from the perspective of someone who enters those societies from outside. It makes this argument not through polemic but through the accumulated texture of lived experience — through dialogue and observation and the particular way Adichie renders the gap between what people say and what they mean and what they feel.

Near fine. A few very minor imperfections; otherwise fine throughout.

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Catalogue Number: HH000587