From the legendary author of Things Fall Apart--a long-awaited
memoir of coming of age in a fragile new nation, and its destruction in
a tragic civil war
For more than forty years, Chinua Achebe maintained a considered silence
on the events of the Nigerian civil war, also known as the Biafran War,
of 1967-1970, addressing them only obliquely through his poetry. Decades
in the making, There Was a Country is a towering account of one of
modern Africa's most disastrous events, from a writer whose words and
courage left an enduring stamp on world literature. A marriage of
history and memoir, vivid firsthand observation and decades of research
and reflection, There Was a Country is a work whose wisdom and
compassion remind us of Chinua Achebe's place as one of the great
literary and moral voices of our age.