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12 stories from the Orange Prize-winning author of "Half Of A Yellow Sun", examining the ties that bind men and women, parents and children, Nigeria and the West. '"The Thing Around Your Neck", with its warm and sympathetic heroines and its finely cadenced un-American English prose, demonstrates that she is keeping faith with her talent and with her country' Lindsay Duguid, "Sunday Times"
Synopsis
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.
Book Details
Publisher:
Harper Collins Paperbacks
Publication Date:
01-Oct-2009
ISBN:
9780007306213
Observer review
The Thing Around Your Neck by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Natasha Tripney the observer Sat 17 October 2009
The short stories in this collection from the Orange prize-winning author of Half of a Yellow Sun are linked by themes of family, loss and exile, focusing on clearly drawn characters from Nigeria. In the title story, a young woman moves to America and struggles to settle, loneliness and dislocation threatening to envelop her completely. It's told in the second person, in a manner that is both distant and intimate. A similar sense of dislocation flows through "American Embassy", in which the mother of a murdered child queues to see an official, swaying in the heat, trapped in some dead place beyond grief. 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.
