Called "the 21st-century daughter of that other great Igbo novelist, Chinua Achebe" (The Washington Post Book World), Nigerian-born writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie exposes the deep scars of colonialism on the African landscape. Her debut novel, Purple Hibiscus, which followed a 15-year-old girl growing up in sheltered privilege in a country ravaged by political strife, received the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best First Book. Her second novel Half of a Yellow Sun received the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award and the Orange Prize. The book takes its title from the emblem for Biafra, the breakaway Nigerian state whose name became a byword for war by starvation. She is also the author of the story collection The Thing Around Your Neck. Spanning three continents, Americanah is a sweeping novel of love, race, and expectation in a globalized society.