Fourth Estate £12.99 pp307

In her impressive first novel, which won the 2002 Caine Prize for African Writing, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie describes a country in which the abundance of nature — insect and bird life, the bougainvillea and frangipani that blossom overnight after the monsoon rains — is in contrast with the human shortages of kerosene, petrol and food. The privileged live in international-style comfort in compounds cut off from the rest by high walls and wire. In the background, mentioned casually as part of everyday life, is a corrupt political system of bribery, censorship, riots and road blocks; in the foreground is the Roman Catholic faith with its doctrine of obedience, its catechism and its guilt. The rituals of mass and rosary are part of the family life of Kambili, the young girl whose getting of wisdom is the central story of Purple Hibiscus.

Kambili’s childhood is dominated by her powerful father, a local big man who draws up a strict daily schedule of prayer and work for his two children, re-inforcing his edicts with cruel punishments, beating them with his leather belt when they don’t come first in class and scalding their feet in the bath to teach them a lesson: “That is what you do to yourself when you walk into sin. You burn your feet.” In order to escape, Kambili must grow up, and to do that she must find something outside her comfortable home and the certainties of the Daughters of the Immaculate Heart school where God seems to speak with a British accent. She finds her salvation through her father’s sister, Aunty Ifeoma, a strong woman with a fund of political wisdom and a warm heart; in her aunt’s crowded flat among her confident cousins, Kambili learns to trust herself, to question and to grow. The simplicity of the transformation tale — the stuff of many old-fashioned school stories — is made more powerful by the plot’s twists and surprises, and by the endearing and moving characters, including Kambili herself, an awkward, tongue-tied teenager. Almost incidentally, it seems, the novel provides a subtle portrait of modern-day Nigeria as a suffering country struggling to recover from the civil war and establish itself as an independent nation. We may be denied the luxury of a happy ending but the hard-earned conclusion holds suggestions of hope.

Adichie uses a deceptively artless first-person voice to take the story in a long retrospective loop back from the prologue, carefully putting in place a series of causes and building up tension. Within the main story, the pace is languid, with many charming scenes of domestic life — hair-plaiting, water-collecting, food preparation. The limpid prose, dotted with Igbo words, is full of sly asides (“It’s time Our Lady came to Africa”) and simple images, such as the sun coming out after rain “mildly, as if yawning after a nap”. Its cleverly contrived naivety opens the reader to a world of feeling containing meaning: “I wanted to tell Mama that . . . our living room had too much empty space, too much wasted marble floor . . . Our ceilings were too high. Our furniture was lifeless.”

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