- Things Fall Apart, first novel by Chinua Achebe, written in English and published in 1958. - Things Fall Apart helped create the Nigerian literary renaissance of the 1960s. - The novel chronicles the life of Okonkwo, the leader of an Igbo community, from the events leading up to his banishment from the community for accidentally killing a clansman, through the seven years of his exile, to his return, and it addresses a particular problem of emergent Africa—the intrusion in the 1890s of white missionaries and colonial government into tribal Igbo society.