Welcome to our next destination on Read the World campaign Nigeria! We will be reading Purple Hibiscus by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. We read Half of a Yellow Sun by the same author last year and it was a fantastic read, so I’m excited to be reading this with you all.

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Here is the Goodreads summary

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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.

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Discussion Schedule

The book isn’t split into official chapters, but the larger sections are split into sections, split by a leaf motif, so the start of each section should be easy to identify, but let me know if you have any problems!

We will be checking in on Tuesdays and the book has been split into 4.

13th February - start to end of paragraph beginning 'That night I dreamed I was laughing' (section 1-6)

20th February - 'Papa drove us to a Christmas mass' to 'My cousins and Jaja laughed' (section 7-9)

27th February – ‘Papa -Nnukwu had woken up before anyone else’ - 'As he drove, we sang Igbo courses' (section 10-12)

5th March - 'The Green sign outside the church' to end (section 13-end)

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See you in two weeks!