The Thing Around Your Neck
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These twelve dazzling stories from the award-winning author of Half of a Yellow Sun Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie are her most intimate works to date.
In these stories Adichie turns her penetrating eye to the ties that bind men and women, parents and children, Nigeria and the United States. In "A Private Experience," a medical student hides from a violent riot with a poor Muslim woman, and the young mother at the centre of "Imitation" finds her comfortable life in Philadelphia threatened when she learns that her husband has moved his mistress into their Lagos home.
Searing and profound, suffused with beauty, sorrow and longing, this collection is a resounding confirmation of Adichie's prodigious literary powers.
About this Author
CHIMAMANDA NGOZI ADICHIE grew up in Nigeria. Her work has been translated into more than fifty-five languages. She is the author of the novels Purple Hibiscus, which won the Commonwealth Writers' Prize; Half of a Yellow Sun, which was the recipient of the Women's Prize for Fiction "Best of the Best" award; Americanah, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award; the story collection The Thing Around Your Neck and the essays We Should All Be Feminists and Dear Ijeawele, or A Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions. Her most recent work is an essay about losing her father, Notes on Grief, and Mama's Sleeping Scarf, a children's book written as Nwa Grace-James. A recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, she divides her time between the United States and Nigeria.
Reviews
Winner of the O. Henry Prize for The American Embassy
"In recounting these people's lives Ms. Adichie demonstrates . . . that she is adept at conjuring the unending personal ripples created by political circumstance."
--The New York Times
"A dozen note-perfect short stories. . . . One of the most artful writers of the English language."
--The Globe and Mail
"Adichie writes with an economy and precision that makes the strange seem familiar. She makes storytelling seem as easy as birdsong."
--The Daily Telegraph
"Mesmerizing. . . . This superior collection accentuates the intellect, insight and blistering honesty that have made Adichie a prominent writer of her generation. . . . Her style might be described as enigmatically ordinary; a prose so effortless that the work it does is practically invisible to the eye."
--Toronto Star
"Powerful. . . . Arresting. The distilled world of the short story suits Adichie beautifully: She shows a rare talent for finding the images and gestures that etch a narrative moment unforgettably in the reader's memory. . . . A very solid collection, [one that] resonates with an aching undercurrent of dislocation and loss of identity. . . . Exquisite stories that will take you to places you didn't know existed."
--The Seattle Times
"Don't let Adichie's highbrow resume scare you away from her accessible and compelling short-story collection. . . . In these stories set both in Nigeria and in the USA, she touches on religion, corruption, Nigeria's civil war and living in America as a lonely African wife. Mostly, however, she creates indelible characters who jump off the page and into your head and heart."
--USA Today
"One comes away from The Thing Around Your Neck heartened by [Acichie's] self-awareness and unpredictability. She knows what it means to sit at the table, and also what it takes to walk away."
--The New York Times Book Review
"Beautifully crafted. . . . This compressed kind of pleasure is abundantly evident in [The Thing Around Your Neck]. Adichie has attracted a lot of attention in her relatively short career. . . . This book will show you why."
--San Diego Union-Tribune
"Superb. . . . With minimal fuss [these stories] present snapshots of Nigerian life. . . . Both as a person and a writer, [Adichie] is engaged in an ongoing project of rebellion against the expectations of others--of those who want to be able to tell her what the world is like, and what her place in it should be."
--The Observer
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