Anthills of the Savannah

Chinua Achebe · 1930–2013 · Nigeria

Why it matters

Three friends, one now a military dictator, one his minister, one a journalist, narrate in turns the slow unraveling of a fictional West African state from inside its corridors of power. Achebe's return to fiction after a twenty-year gap, and his most structurally daring novel.

At a glance

Multiple first-person narrators and a nonlinear structure demand tracking who's speaking and when.