Purple Hibiscus begins with the line, ‘Things started to fall apart at home,’ a possible allusion to Chinua Achebe’s novel Things Fall Apart, pointing to the change and disorder that have characterised Nigeria’s troubled past. As the novel begins, Kambili struggles to know her own mind, let alone speak it. When she and her brother go to stay with her cousin and Aunty Ifeoma, a lecturer at a university campus, they experience first-hand the anger and confusion felt by Nigeria’s youth, and watch as their aunt is forced to leave for America. While Chimamanda explores the wider issues of faith, tradition and politics – relating the rituals of both Christian and traditional Igbo beliefs, the death of Kambili’s estranged grandfather, and the student riots at the university – she also memorably evokes the very personal experience of growing up.

Chimamanda’s characters are well drawn, and there is a subtle and reserved quality to the first-person narration; a quiet tension that drives the reader on, showing Kambili’s powerlessness at the violence she experiences. The purple hibiscuses that grow in Aunty Ifeoma’s garden – an ‘experimental’ strain, ‘rare, fragrant with the undertones of freedom’ – become the book’s central metaphor as Kambili develops into her own voice, blossoming amid the freedom her aunt allows her. The questions that define Kambili’s character – when to speak and when to remain silent, when to act and when to prevent action – are ones with which all of the characters struggle, both in the intimate circumstances of everyday family life and in the wider world.

Nominated for the 2004 Booker Prize, Purple Hibiscus is an impressive debut which Chimamanda wrote when she was just twenty-five. It is a compelling story that handles powerful subject matter with skill and sensitivity, but which also owes some of its best passages to descriptions of the small moments that make up everyday life. It is her attention to detail in etching daily minutiae such as the preparation of food, tending a garden or listening to music, that so effectively complements her more dramatic and thought-provoking observations.

Over the course of two and a half years, Arundhati builds a narrative around world events and institutions, discussing 9/11, the outbreak of the Iraq war and numerous other issues. In fact, so much is discussed – from the ubiquitous Michael Moore to call centres in India, that readers may find themselves overwhelmed by her expansive erudition. However, it is by focusing on her native India that she reveals the true nature of globalisation; one of the most memorable and pointed passages is her description of India’s privatisation of its electricity infrastructure to Enron.

At times this is an uneasy book to read. Arundhati’s opinions are dazzlingly forthright, exposing facts about the balance of power in our world that we daily choose to ignore. Her personality and way with words are at once compelling and distracting: the conversational format and her complicity with David, means they pass over some topics more quickly than some readers might like. The contradiction that Indian women must rail against tradition, yet at the same time ‘against the kind of modernity that is being imposed by the global economy,’ is one that she herself seems to embody.

A recommendation from Noam Chomsky and an introduction by Naomi Klein make this prescribed academic reading, but for those wishing to gain an insight into the mind of a gifted writer’s politics this an immensely readable book. Arundhati Roy’s aim is clear, seeking ‘to create links, to join the dots, to tell politics like a story, to communicate it, to make it real’, and although she offers no real answers to combating the problems she so passionately explores, this is an inspiring book.