'Fiction is a solution, the best solution, to the problem of existential solitude'

The Thing Around Your Neck Hardback
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The Thing Around Your Neck

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

In ‘A Private Experience,’ 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 she’s been pushing away. In ‘Tomorrow Is Too Far,’ a woman unlocks the devastating secret that surrounds her brother’s death. The young mother at the center of ‘Imitation’ finds her comfortable life threatened when she learns that her husband back in Lagos has moved his mistress into their 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 re-examine them.

Searing and profound, suffused with beauty, sorrow and longing, this collection is a resounding confirmation of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s prodigious storytelling powers.

Reviews of The Thing Around Your Neck

    • ‘Her writing is clear-eyed and fresh, her characters simply drawn…Adichie writes with a cool detachment that allows her to plunder grief and stereotype to brilliant effect.’ Times
    • ‘Adichie is a skilled storyteller with a fluid, straightforward style and while some of the stories feel constrained by their length, the majority are perfectly balanced.’ Observer
    • Chosen as a Book of the Year by The Sunday Times
    • ‘Casts a sympathetic eye on the plight of Nigerians who dream of living abroad, and those adjusting to the immigrant’s life’ Financial Times, Books of the Year

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