New Yorkers have spoken! Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s novel Americanah is the inaugural pick for the One Book, One New York program, a partnership between the New York City Mayor’s Office of Media and Entertainment (MOME) and BuzzFeed to encourage New Yorkers to read the same book at the same time. New Yorkers had the chance to vote on one of five books, each recommended by a celebrity, and chose National Book Critics Circle award winner Americanah, which Bebe Neuwirth describes as “an absolute knockout of a novel … written by one of the most fantastic female voices in fiction today.”
In a special video message, Adichie thanked New Yorkers, saying, “In my novel Americanah, one of the characters talks about how Americans are always excited about things. But I want to say that today, like Americans, I am so excited that you chose my book as the winner of the One Book, One New York program.”
Since the program was announced in February, 4,000 copies of the five books (which also included Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me, Paul Beatty’s The Sellout, Betty Smith’s A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, and Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao) have been donated to NYC’s library branches. More copies of Americanah will be donated now that it has won, which means plenty of options for locals to pick up a copy. You can check out the official page for One Book, One New York to find out how to read as a community: in the coming months, MOME will be putting on a number of free events across all five boroughs, with a big event in June. Penguin Random House has also provided a 20-question-deep discussion guide if you want to run your own private book club. You can also follow along with the conversation on Twitter using #OneBookNY.
