In that sense, "Things Fall Apart" is not just the starting point of African literature, but of modern African literature: contemporary, hybrid, global in its implications, influenced by everything, and richer for it in its evocation of the world.
But the power of Shriver's work lies less in the details of how and when and why than it does in its evocation of a woman who is scrabbling desperately to come to terms with the unthinkable, a portrait that no television interview could possibly give, even it were conducted at the length of a mini series.
That blind man might tell you something, lead you somewhere". It is perhaps in its evocation of the strange, occult world of blackmail, conspiracy and shame, and the seediness of a certain type of London, that Victim holds up best.
In its sympathetic portrayal of the mad boy Barnaby, and in its evocation of a turbulent London, it transcends the usual boundaries of the historical novel and becomes a complete statement of human weakness and communal power.
It's a lovingly executed concept, and moving at times in its evocation of the ghosts who inhabit the building, but it suffers from being installed into too open and day-lit a space, and has none of the privileged mysteries of Lucy Carter's Hidden.
It is not a sumptuous visual style, but it is an effective one, particularly in its evocation of the way in which a child sees the world.
It is, at times, almost unbearably poignant in its evocation of childhood innocence and adult stoicism.
Though Monologue About a Whole Life Written Down on Doors, the testimony of Nikolai Fomich Kalugin is based, as its title suggests, on testimony, it is as powerful as any fiction in its evocation of a father's attempt to come to terms with the 1986 disaster.
Yet in its evocation of our blind urge towards creativity, it is utterly captivating.
In its evocation of a city transformed by sectarian violence, it foreshadows his later poem about Jerusalem: Murder has changed the city's shape — this stone is a child's head — and this smoke is exhaled from human lungs.
It is no coincidence that the novel seems Atwoodesque in its evocation of a closed order of women.
