Purple Hibiscus

A touching and heart-rending story, told with an extraordinary self-confidence that is rare in debut novel...

Purple Hibiscus captures for us the traumatic moments of a wealthy Nigerian family as it gradually breaks up, mined tragically, on the one hand, by the cruel abuses of a father turned callous by an inexorable, fanatic brand of Catholicism, and on the other, by the familiar brutalities of the murderous military regimes of our recent past.

The victims survive however, rescued by the love that binds the children to their mother, and the mother to her children.

Thus this would seem to make Chimamanda a gentler and perhaps more tender kin sister of Buchi Emecheta. But in fact it is the master, Chinua Achebe himself, that she echoes more acutely by her delicate manipulation of syntax and trope, her control of irony and suspense, and her mastery of those subtle details that build and heighten effect.

Her heroine, Kambili, may be shy, and submissive, but her reticence is the author's deliberate ploy to amplify her power of observation, sharpen her eye for detail and description, and empower her with a prose so fine and so distilled that it intensifies her eloquence and makes the pain even more incandescent.

Nigerian literature is full of many oaks, and many of them already sagging... it is refreshing to find a new voice bursting out at last, to proclaim a new dawn, like-well, a purple hibiscus...

-Femi Osofisan (Professor of Drama, University of Ibadan)

Author: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie