The Thing Around Your Neck
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Hardcover
(Knopf, June 16, 2009)
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie burst onto the literary scene with her remarkable debut novel, Purple Hibiscus, which critics hailed as âone of the best novels to come out of Africa in yearsâ (Baltimore Sun), with âprose as lush as the Nigerian landscape that it powerfully evokesâ (The Boston Globe); The Washington Post called her âthe twenty-first-century daughter of Chinua Achebe.â Her award-winning Half of a Yellow Sun became an instant classic upon its publication three years later, once again putting her tremendous giftsâgraceful storytelling, knowing compassion, and fierce insight into her charactersâ heartsâon display. Now, in her most intimate and seamlessly crafted work to date, Adichie turns her penetrating eye on not only Nigeria but America, in twelve dazzling stories that explore the ties that bind men and women, parents and children, Africa and the United States.In âA Private Experience,â a medical student hides from a violent riot with a poor Muslim woman whose dignity and faith force her to confront the realities and fears sheâs been pushing away. In âTomorrow is Too Far,â a woman unlocks the devastating secret that surrounds her brotherâs death. The young mother at the center of âImitationâ finds her comfortable life in Philadelphia threatened when she learns that her husband has moved his mistress into their Lagos home. And the title story depicts the choking loneliness of a Nigerian girl who moves to an America that turns out to be nothing like the country she expected; though falling in love brings her desires nearly within reach, a death in her homeland forces her to reexamine them.Searing and profound, suffused with beauty, sorrow, and longing, these stories map, with Adichieâs signature emotional wisdom, the collision of two cultures and the deeply human struggle to reconcile them. The Thing Around Your Neck is a resounding confirmation of the prodigious literary powers of one of our most essential writers.