The Thing Around Your Neck
by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
These beautifully written short stories from former Orange Prize winner, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, feature a range of compelling characters whose personal experiences raise much wider issues and questions.
Themes of alienation, identity and love recur throughout the collection; in The Arrangers of Marriage we learn of Chinaza who leaves Nigeria for a bewildering new life in America with a husband she's barely met.
The American Embassy portrays a woman grieving for her murdered child and trying to make sense of a life and country in turmoil.
In the title story, Akunna's American visa does not bring the luxury her relatives back in Lagos predict, but loneliness does force her to look beneath the surface of her new home and question the nature of the acceptance she receives there.
This assured, insightful and often moving collection of stories will stay with the reader long after they have turned the last page.
Publisher: Fourth Estate
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Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie was born in 1977 in Enugu, Nigeria. She studied medicine and pharmacy at the University of Nigeria then moved to the US to study communications and political science at Eastern Connecticut State University. She gained an MA in Creative Writing from Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore. After initially writing poetry and one play, For Love of Biafra (1998), she had several short stories published in literary journals, winning various competition prizes. Her first novel, Purple Hibiscus, won the 2005 Commonwealth Writers Prize (Overall Winner, Best Book), and was shortlisted for the 2004 Orange Prize for Fiction. Her second novel is Half of a Yellow Sun (2006), set before and during the Biafran War. It won the 2007 Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
