In 1960s Nigeria, three lives intersect. Ugwu works as a houseboy for a university professor. Olanna has abandoned her life of privilege in Lagos to live with her charismatic lover, the lecturer. And Richard, a shy Englishman, is in thrall to Olanna's enigmatic twin sister. Amongst the horror of Nigeria's civil war, loyalties are tested as they are pulled apart and thrown together in ways none of them imagined.

Winner of the Women's Prize for Fiction, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's masterpiece is a novel about race, class and the end of colonialism - and the ways in which love can complicate everything.