Things Fall Apart

Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart was first published in London by Heinemann on 17 June 1958 and is set in colonial Nigeria. Okonkwo is a wrestling champion and an influential man in Umuofia, a village of the fictional Igbo clan, who has built his standing from nothing in deliberate opposition to his father, Unoka, an indolent debtor who preferred his flute and his drink to his farm and his family. Okonkwo works hard for his wealth and his fame, and he is impatient with anything he reads as weakness, including in his own household.

The first part of the novel describes that household, the customs and gatherings of the clan, and the fear of weakness that drives Okonkwo, who is often violent with his wives and children. He is chosen by the elders to be guardian of Ikemefuna, a boy taken from another clan as part of a peace settlement. The later parts of the book bring the arrival of British missionaries and administrators, who introduce a church and a court, and a version of order that the clan's own structures cannot hold against.

Things Fall Apart was Achebe's debut novel and the first of what is known as the African trilogy, which continues with No Longer at Ease (1960) and Arrow of God (1964). Its title is taken from a verse in W. B. Yeats's 1919 poem "The Second Coming".