The Thing Around Your Neck

"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."---The Seattle Times

In these twelve dazzling stories, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie---acclaimed author of Half of a Yellow Sun---explores the ties that bind men and women, parents and children, Africa and the United States. Searing and profound, suffused with beauty, sorrow, and longing, these stories map, with Adichie's signature emotional wisdom, the collision of two cultures and the deeply human struggle to reconcile them.

`Tragic, defiant, revelatory.... Adichie deploys her calm, deceptive prose to portray women in Nigeria and America who are forced to match their wits against threats ranging from marauding guerrillas to microwave ovens."---The Washington Post

"Masterful....These stories once again prove that Adichie is one of those rare writers any country or continent would feel proud to claim as its own."---San Francisco Chronicle

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie grew up in Nigeria. Her work has been translated into thirty languages and has appeared in various publications, including The O. Henry Prize Stories, 2003; The New Yorker; Granta; the Financial Times; and Zoetrope. Her most recent novel, Half of a Yellow Sun, won the Orange Broadband Prize and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; it was a New York Times Notable Book and a People and Black Issues Book Review Best Book of the Year. Her first novel, Purple Hibiscus, won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award. A recipient of a 2008 MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, she divides her time between the United States and Nigeria.


From the Hardcover edition.