"In this book, Ms. Adichie has constructed a full on romance that has the addictive power of a Jane Austen novel but with the specifics of life in Nigeria, as well as life in the United States as an immigrant. I fell in love with Ifemelu and Obinze in a way that I haven’t felt since I was a child reading novels for the first time."

"Before I read Achebe as a child in Nigeria, I read only foreign children’s books, and so I wrote about the same things I was reading – all my characters were White and the stories were set in England or a generic Westernised country. I had not read books that featured people like me, so I thought that books couldn’t include people like me. Until I discovered Achebe. I didn’t realise it at the time, of course – I was too young to be consciously aware of that sort of thing – but later I would realise that reading Achebe was a turning point. It made me see that it was, in fact, possible for people of colour to exist within literature. Arrow of God has remained one of my favourite novels. Set in 1920s Igboland, it tells the story of a remarkable priest, Ezeulu, and a British administrator, and the ways in which colonialism brought not only political but cultural changes. It is funny and absorbing, moving and beautiful. I love this book."