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This website is dedicated to the novel Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe. Things Fall Apart is about a village in Eastern Nigeria in the late 1800s. The novel follows a high ranking, ambitious man named Okonkwo as Christian missionaries “civilize” the region. The novel has two interconnecting stories. One follows Okonkwo’s “fall from grace.”(Random House- Academic Recourse), and the other involves the clash of two different cultures. Things Fall Apart is a tragedy and Okonkwo as the tragic hero. It compares to the play Oedipus Rex, a Greek tragedy. In both, the tragic hero tries to avoid their inevitable fate.

Things Fall Apart has sold more than eight million copies in English and has been translated into fifty languages. It is easily the most widely read African Novel. Things Fall Apart not only depicts the effects of British Imperialism on an African tribe, it offers insight into any other culture which has “fallen apart” as well.