'If you have love, even plain cold water is sweet'

The Thing Around Your Neck Paperback

The Thing Around Your Neck

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

From the Orange Prize-winning author of ‘Half of a Yellow Sun’ come twelve dazzling stories that turn a penetrating eye on the ties that bind men and women, parents and children, Nigeria and the West.

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 centre 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

    • `A remarkable collection combining Adichie’s poise, assurance and coolly understated style. The perfect riposte to anyone who believes short stories can’t be every bit as involving as novels’ Daily Mail
    • `The writing throughout the book has a verve that propels you forward through the pages. And a pervasive, lightly mocking intelligence gives the whole thing a lively, satirical edge’ Guardian
    • `A powerful writer, moving with disquieting ease from humour to horror, and anger to tenderness . . . This is storytelling at its very best, its roots in an ancient tradition, giving all that precedes it a poignant and sobering context’ Scotsman
    • `The Thing Around Your Neck, with its warm and sympathetic heroines and its finely cadenced prose, demonstrates that [Adichie] is keeping faith with her talent and with her country’ Sunday Times

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