Taken together, Chinua Achebe's five novels--"Things Fall Apart" (1958), "No Longer at Ease" (1960), "A Man of the People" (1966), "Arrow of God" (1967), and "Anthills of the Savannah" (1988)--encompass the entire social, historical, and political experiences of Nigeria, from precolonial times to the close of the 20th century. Central to these experiences is the clash of Igbo culture with the ways of the West. The novels show a society that has been fragmented and a people who are striving to reconstruct a world that they lost during their encounter with colonialism. Achebe has stated that...