Americanah

Ifemelu and Obinze meet at secondary school in Lagos and fall quickly, deeply in love. With university strikes and an uncertain future, Ifemelu takes a chance to study in the United States, and Obinze plans to follow. In America she struggles at first with money, loneliness and the strange new rules of race, and she cuts off contact with Obinze after a painful episode she cannot bring herself to share.

Over the following years Ifemelu finishes her studies, dates a wealthy white businessman and later a Black academic at Yale, and starts a blog that dissects race in America from the point of view of a non-American Black woman. It makes her well known. Obinze, refused an American visa after the September 11 attacks, overstays in London, working cash jobs under a borrowed identity until he is caught. Back in Lagos he becomes rich in property and marries. The novel moves between their lives, and when Ifemelu decides to return home, the question of what they still mean to each other becomes impossible to ignore.

Long but lively, full of humor and memorable observations. About 588 pages, and named one of the New York Times's ten best books of the year.