WINNER 2013 – National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction FINALIST 2014 – Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction FINALIST 2014 – Andrew Carnegie Medal for Fiction LONGLISTED 2015 – International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award A searing new novel, at once sweeping and intimate, by the award-winning author of Half of a Yellow Sun: a story of love and race centered around a man and woman from Nigeria who seemed destined to be together--until the choices they are forced to make tear them apart. Ifemelu--beautiful, self-assured--left Nigeria 15 years ago, and now studies in Princeton as a Graduate Fellow. She seems to have fulfilled every immigrant's dream: Ivy League education; success as a writer of a wildly popular political blog; money for the things she needs. But what came before is more like a nightmare: wrenching departure from family; humiliating jobs under a false name. She feels for the first time the weight of something she didn't think about back home: race. Obinze--handsome and kind-hearted--was Ifemelu's teenage love; he'd hoped to join her in America, but post 9/11 America wouldn't let him in. Obinze's journey leads him to back alleys of illegal employment in London; to a fake marriage for the sake of a work card, and finally, to a set of handcuffs as he is exposed and deported. Years later, when they reunite in Nigeria, neither is the same person who left home. Obinze is the kind of successful "Big Man" he'd scorned in his youth, and Ifemelu has become an "Americanah"--a different version of her former self, one with a new accent and attitude. As they revisit their shared passion--for their homeland and for each other--they must face the largest challenges of their lives. Spanning three continents, entering the lives of a richly drawn cast of characters across numerous divides, Americanah is a riveting story of love and expectation set in today's globalized world.

NUBClub didn't particularly like this book, although there were defenders in the crowd. We all agreed that the book's look at two Nigerian ex-lover on their parallel journeys in America and Africa offered some settings and context we had not been exposed to before. All of us were interested in Obinze's story, and how his story becomes a picture of how people navigate immigration and how he finds success. Also, we all liked the question the book raises about assimmilation and authentic identity, and the way that Ifemelu transforms in the US -- both to her eventually success as a blog as well as her alienation from her home community -- is an interesting counterpoint about what "successful" immigration can do to an individual. The main issue we had with the book is that most of us found Ifemelu insufferable as a character. The scenes in the hair salon, which take up much of the novel, reveal her as a judgmental and arrogant narrator, and we often found ourselves siding with the people she was criticizing. Her plight in America was not that sympathetic to us, because she was just so awful a character. And when your story is at its heart a romance, it's a hard pill to swallow when you find one of the reunited lovers awful and not worthy of the relationship. The writing here is competent but not noteworthy, so the book basically lived or died on the plot and characters, and so not liking Ifemelu killed the book for most of us. Those that liked the book just did not find her distasteful, and as a result, enjoyed the love story told through differing experiencing of immigration. NUBClub as a whole can't recommend this one, but it might be worth glancing at one of Ifemelu's salon chapters to see if it offends you. If it doesn't, Americanah may be for you.