Under the Udala Trees

By: Chinelo Okparanta (Author), 2016, Paperback

A 2017 Granta's Best of Young American NovelistFinalist for the 2017 International Dublin Literary PrizeOne of NPR's Best Books of 2015A 2016 Lambda Award Winner Long-listed for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize
Nominated for the 2015 NAACP Image Awards (Outstanding Literary Work of Fiction)
Nominated for the 2015 Nigerian Writers Awards (Young Motivational Writer of the 
A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice

Inspired by Nigeria's folktales and its war, Under the Udala Trees is a deeply searching, powerful debut about the dangers of living and loving openly.

Ijeoma comes of age as her nation does; born before independence, she is eleven when civil war breaks out in the young republic of Nigeria. Sent away to safety, she meets another displaced child and they, star-crossed, fall in love. They are from different ethnic communities. They are also both girls.   When their love is discovered, Ijeoma learns that she will have to hide this part of herself. But there is a cost to living inside a lie.       As Edwidge Danticat has made personal the legacy of Haiti's political coming of age, Okparanta's Under the Udala Trees uses one woman's lifetime to examine the ways in which Nigerians continue to struggle toward selfhood. Even as their nation contends with and recovers from the effects of war and division, Nigerian lives are also wrecked and lost from taboo and prejudice. This story offers a glimmer of hope -- a future where a woman might just be able to shape her life around truth and love.  Acclaimed by Vogue, the Financial Times, and many others, Chinelo Okparanta continues to distill "experience into something crystalline, stark but lustrous" (New York Times Book Review). Under the Udala Trees marks the further rise of a star whose "tales will break your heart open" (New York Daily News).