Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe

Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe

Set in the late 19th century, at the height of the "Scramble" for African territories by the great European powers, Things Fall Apart tells the story of Okonkwo, a proud and highly respected Igbo from Umuofia, somewhere near the Lower Niger. Okonkwo's clan are farmers, their complex society a patriarchal, democratic one. Achebe suggests that village life has not changed substantially in generations.

 

But then the English arrive in their region, with the Bible – rather than the gun – their weapon of choice. As the villagers begin to convert to Christianity, the ties that had ensured the clan's equilibrium come undone. As Okonkwo's friend Obierika explains: "The white man is very clever. He came quietly and peaceably with his religion. We were amused at his foolishness and allowed him to stay. Now he has won our brothers and our clan can no longer act like one." Unwilling to adapt, Okonkwo finds himself the protagonist in a modern Greek tragedy.

The first part of a trilogy, Things Fall Apart was one of the first African novels to gain worldwide recognition: half a century on, it remains one of the great novels about the colonial era.

The story's main theme concerns pre- and post-colonial life in late nineteenth century Nigeria. It is seen as the archetypal modern African novel in English, one of the first to receive global critical acclaim. It is a staple book in schools throughout Africa and is widely read and studied in English-speaking countries around the world. It was first published in 1958 in the UK; in 1962, it was also the first work published in Heinemann's African Writers Series. The title of the novel comes from a line in  W B Yeats' poem The Second Coming.  

Things Fall Apart was followed by a sequel, originally written as the second part of a larger work along with a further title.  Achebe states that two later novels A Man of the People (1966) and Anthills of the Savannah (1987), while not featuring Okonkwo's descendants, are spiritual successors to the previous novels in chronicling African history.  Anthills of the Savannah  was a finalist for the 1987 Booker Prize for Fiction.

Darwin's Ghosts: In Search of the First Evolutionists by Rebecca Stott

Darwin's Ghosts: In Search of the First Evolutionists by Rebecca Stott

Soon after publication of On the Origin of Species, Charles Darwin received a letter that deeply unsettled him. He had expected outrage and accusations of heresy, but this letter was different: it accused him of taking credit for a theory that wasn't his. Yet when he tried to trace his intellectual forebears, he found that history had already forgotten them...

During the Christmas celebrations of 1860 Charles Darwin sat down to try to assemble a list of his predecessors, the men who had held evolutionary ideas before him. But as he was such a poor scholar of history, he told his friends, he failed to find more than ghostly presences and vestiges of their lives.

In this chronicle of scientific courage and insight, Rebecca Stott goes in search of those first evolutionists whose intellectual originality and daring have been lost to us and to Darwin. She rediscovers Aristotle walking the shores of Lesbos with his pupils and Leonardo da Vinci searching for fossils in the mine-shafts of the Tuscan hills; Diderot, in Paris, exploring the origins of species while under the surveillance of the secret police, and the brilliant naturalists of the Jardin des Plantes finding evidence for evolutionary change in the natural history collections stolen during the Napoleonic wars. Darwin’s Ghosts is a tale of mummified birds, inland lagoons, Bedouin nomads, secret police files, microscopes and curiosity cabinets, as well as the history of a profoundly dangerous idea.

This a masterful and thoroughly engaging retelling of the collective daring of a few like-minded men, whose early theories flew in the face of prevailing political and religious orthodoxies and laid the foundations for Darwin's revolutionary idea.

The Light Between Oceans

Originally from Western Australia, M L Stedman has for many years lived in London, where she worked as a lawyer. She first decided to try creative writing in 1997, and set about finding a writing tutor. In the years that followed she did a few writing courses, and some of her short stories were published in anthologies.


Her debut novel, The Light Between Oceans, draws inspiration from the landscape of her native Western Australia, though she wrote and researched much of it, at the British Library.

A survivor of the First World War trenches, Tom enjoys the solitude of life as a lighthousekeeper, but one trip to the mainland brings him a wife, Isabel, with whom to share Janus Rock.

"The crying persisted.  The door of the lighthouse clanged in the distance, and Tom's tall frame appeared on the gallery as he scanned the island with the binoculars.  'Izzy!' he yelled, 'a boat!'  He vanished and re-emerged at ground level.  'It's a boat all right', Tom declared.  'And - oh cripes!  There's a bloke, but -'  The figure was motionless, yet the cries still rang out.  He hoisted out a woollen bundle: a woman's soft lavender cardigan wrapped around a tiny, screaming infant."

One fateful day, the sea washes a dinghy up on the shore containing the body of a man and a baby - very much alive - which the couple, desperate to start a family, decide to take as their own.

It is a tragic story about good people and the tragic decisions that they made.  They break the rules and follow their hearts.  It is about the love and beauty that Tom and Isabel found in their decisions for a brief interlude.  It is a story about right and wrong and the fine line that sometimes separates these values.  It is a story for which there can never be a 'good' and tidy outcome for the characters involved.