Things Fall Apart

Achebe rendered Igbo village life -- its proverbs, rituals, and internal tensions -- with enough density to refuse the colonial image of Africa as blank or savage. Following Okonkwo from local eminence to ruin as missionaries and the British arrive, it built a template for African fiction in English: ironic, rooted in oral speech, and unsparing about a society's own faults.

Its legacy. It became the most widely read and translated African novel, a fixture of curricula worldwide.