As a girl in Nigeria, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie wrote story after story about the sort of people she read about in books: "white people with blue eyes who ate apples and had winter." Only as a teenager, after reading Chinua Achebe's novel "Things Fall Apart" and realizing her people's own stories were worth telling, did she begin describing the world she knew. Yet when she graduated first in her high school class, she abandoned writing to enroll in pre-med. Doctors could always find work, and in her troubled homeland, Sunday churchgoers pray not only for peace and love, but also for U.S. visas.

"I have noticed about my people that we tend not really to put emphasis on what we would like to do; instead we do what we have to do," said Adichie, 26. "It happens with being Nigerian that you have to make sacrifices. I thought maybe I should be a doctor and write part-time because writing isn't that serious," she said.

Dissecting frogs made her realize that the sacrifice would be too great. Adichie came to the United States in 1998 to study her first love, writing. Her extraordinary debut novel, "Purple Hibiscus," is the new selection of the Talking Volumes regional book club, a public service project to build community through reading, founded by the Star Tribune, Minnesota Public Radio and the Loft Literary Center.

The story, recounted by a 15-year-old girl, captures the love and conflict of a family whose patriarch is staunchly Catholic. Against the backdrop of a corrupt, crumbling society, the implacable force of religious fundamentalism plays out not against secular humanism, but against the animist practices of tribal elders.

"I wanted to write about how I wish that people would be more accommodating in their faith," said Adichie (whose name is pronounced chee-ma-MON-da ah-DEECH-yeh). "It's fine to be Catholic, but people who choose to follow the old way of ancestral worship are not devils."

Nigeria made headlines recently when a woman was sentenced to death by stoning for adultery under the law of Sharia. While the nation of 120 million is mainly Islamic in the north, where that controversial case arose, in the south it is mostly Christian, with Pentecostalists gaining rapidly on the dominant Catholics.

Although Adichie was raised a Catholic, "Purple Hibiscus" is not autobiographical. Her father, a retired professor of statistics, is a fervent believer but "the kind who makes room for dissent." Adichie, who remembers being criticized as a child by a priest for asking too many questions, still considers herself "a Catholic of sorts."

When she attended Drexel University in Philadelphia, Adichie was a lay reader at "a lovely, warm church with all kinds of people, open and embracing and Catholic." After she transferred to Eastern Connecticut State University, where she lived with her older sister, she quit attending except when their parents visited, because she disliked the hard-line attitude at the local parish.

She blames religion for "feeding people so much nonsense" in God's name. In Nigeria, on a continent where AIDS education and treatment are especially critical, it is considered improper to talk about sexually transmitted diseases -- except to brand them the devil's work -- and taboo even to acknowledge the existence of homosexuality, she said.

Her 71-year-old father remembers when the first missionaries arrived in his hometown in the late 1930s. Until then, the indigenous beliefs were not institutionalized via churches and schools. "Sometimes I wonder if they recognized it as religion, in the sense that it was just the way things were; it wasn't apart. 'That stream is dedicated to the goddess so you don't go there to bathe, you go to the other stream.'

"Maybe I idealize it, but there's something purer and true about that time," she said, bursting into peals of laughter. "My dad would be horrified to hear me say that."

Home and away

Adichie uses her hometown, the university town of Nsukka, and her ancestral village as principal settings for "Purple Hibiscus." Her father taught in Nsukka and her mother rose through the college administration to become its dean of students. Two of her sisters were born in the United States when their father attended the University of California, Berkeley, in the late 1960s. With dual citizenship, one is a pharmacist in Nigeria, the other is a doctor in Connecticut. One of her brothers, an engineer, lives outside London. Another is studying computer science at Adichie's alma mater in Connecticut and living with their sister. The third just graduated from college in Nigeria, in agricultural engineering, and hasn't yet decided where to settle.

"I would've liked to be in Nigeria with everyone in my family there," said Adichie. "My book wouldn't have happened, though. My sister is a doctor and she has a practice that's doing well in Connecticut and she probably wouldn't have that if she had stayed in Nigeria. So you make those choices, just because Nigeria is truly crumbling and I don't know that it will come back together."

The economy and the educational system were much stronger when she was a child, attending schools for children of the university faculty. In fifth grade, she wrote a play and her class performed it. She won a writing prize and her teacher, Mrs. Kalu, pronounced her destiny. "She said to everybody there, 'She's going to be our star!' and I remember thinking, 'Oh, I hope so!' I would write things and give them to her and she actually took her time with my little stories."

Her family teased her when she boasted that they would one day read her books, said her sister Dr. Rosemary Maduka. One brother called Adichie "Joseph the Dreamer" after the biblical character. "When a lot of her age-mates were hanging out going to parties, that wasn't my sister," Maduka said. "She found more joy in reading, reading, reading."

Even in their relatively isolated hometown, Adichie and her family felt the aftershocks of violence that erupted in the capital of Abuja and in Lagos, Nigeria's largest city, with 12 million inhabitants. Coups were staged in 1983 and 1993, and an abortive coup in 1990 resulted in the execution of 69 alleged plotters.

"It's not like we heard the shelling," said Adichie, "but it affects you when you hear the announcement on the radio that you have a new head of state. Then you see the prices rising in the markets, you see the people lose jobs and soldiers seem to rule, literally rule, over everything."