Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe (1958)

The boy calls him father. When the oracle decrees Ikemefuna must die, Okonkwo is warned to take no part, and then, afraid of seeming weak, cuts the boy down himself. This is the man at the center of the book: Okonkwo of Umuofia, who threw the wrestler Amalinze the Cat, built wealth and a great compound out of nothing, and spent his life outrunning the memory of a gentle, debt-ridden father he could not forgive. Chinua Achebe renders the Igbo world with a precision that needs no anthropology, its courts and oracles and proverbs carrying the argument of centuries, a civilization that owes no one an explanation. Then the missionaries arrive, offering a god who will take in the outcast and the failed, and the seams begin to give. What devastates is that the very hardness that made Okonkwo great makes him the wrong man to meet the change. _Things Fall Apart_ does not mourn a lost paradise but a living world, whole and self-sufficient, and a world is the harder thing by far to watch come undone.