Purple Hibiscus: A Novel (Paperback)

Staff Pick Badge
Purple Hibiscus: A Novel By Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Cover Image

Purple Hibiscus: A Novel (Paperback)

$18.99


On Our Shelves Now
On hand as of Mar 26 9:18pm
(Fiction)

Staff Reviews


Purple Hibiscus is a coming-of-age story about a girl in Nigeria who must navigate her life under the watchful eyes of her religious and abusive father. She is caught between wanting to live up to her father's expectations and coming to terms with the cult-like way in which he runs his household. 

Reading this book feels like eating a perfectly balanced meal that leaves you feeling comfortably satisfied. To be sure, that does not mean this is light-hearted or particularly jovial, but it offers all the best substance a novel can contain and concludes with a delightful catharsis. It is a book you can enjoy many times, as I have.

- Clarisse

— From Clarisse

“One of the most vital and original novelists of her generation.” —Larissa MacFarquhar, The New Yorker

From the bestselling author of Americanah and We Should All Be Feminists


Fifteen-year-old Kambili and her older brother Jaja lead a privileged life in Enugu, Nigeria. They live in a beautiful house, with a caring family, and attend an exclusive missionary school. They're completely shielded from the troubles of the world. Yet, as Kambili reveals in her tender-voiced account, things are less perfect than they appear. Although her Papa is generous and well respected, he is fanatically religious and tyrannical at home—a home that is silent and suffocating.

As the country begins to fall apart under a military coup, Kambili and Jaja are sent to their aunt, a university professor outside the city, where they discover a life beyond the confines of their father’s authority. Books cram the shelves, curry and nutmeg permeate the air, and their cousins’ laughter rings throughout the house. When they return home, tensions within the family escalate, and Kambili must find the strength to keep her loved ones together.

Purple Hibiscus is an exquisite novel about the emotional turmoil of adolescence, the powerful bonds of family, and the bright promise of freedom.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie grew up in Nigeria. Her work has been translated into thirty languages and has appeared in various publications, including The O. Henry Prize Stories 2003, the New Yorker, Granta, the Financial Times, and Zoetrope. Purple Hibiscus, her first novel, won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award. Her novel Half of a Yellow Sun won the Orange Broadband Prize and was a New York Times Notable Book and a People Best Book of the Year; her novel Americanah won the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her story collection, The Thing Around Your Neck, was the winner of the 2010 Dayton Literary Peace Prize. A recipient of a 2008 MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, she divides her time between the United States and Nigeria.
Product Details ISBN: 9781616202415
ISBN-10: 1616202416
Publisher: Algonquin Books
Publication Date: April 17th, 2012
Pages: 336
Language: English
“Breathtaking . . . Adichie is very much the twenty-first-century daughter of that other great Igbo novelist, Chinua Achebe.” —The Washington Post Book World

“The author's straightforward prose captures the tragic riddle of a man who has made an unquestionably positive contribution to the lives of strangers while abandoning the needs of those who are closest to him.” —The New York Times Book Review

“Prose as lush as the Nigerian landscape that it powerfully evokes . . . Adichie's understanding of a young girl's heart is so acute that her story ultimately rises above its setting and makes her little part of Nigeria seem as close and vivid as Eudora Welty's Mississippi.” —The Boston Globe 

“Amazing.” —Minneapolis Star Tribune