**From the legendary author of *Things Fall Apart* —a long-awaited memoir of coming of age in a fragile new nation, and its destruction in a tragic civil war** For more than forty years, Chinua Achebe maintained a considered silence on the events of the Nigerian civil war, also known as the Biafran War, of 1967–1970, addressing them only obliquely through his poetry. Decades in the making, *There Was a Country* is a towering account of one of modern Africa’s most disastrous events, from a writer whose words and courage left an enduring stamp on world literature. A marriage of history and memoir, vivid firsthand observation and decades of research and reflection, *There Was a Country* is a work whose wisdom and compassion remind us of Chinua Achebe’s place as one of the great literary and moral voices of our age.