About the Author

CHIMAMANDA NGOZI ADICHIE grew up in Nigeria. Her work has been translated into more than 55 languages and has appeared in various publications, including The New Yorker, The New York Times, Granta, The O. Henry Prize Stories, and Financial Times. She is the author of the novels Purple Hibiscus, which won the Commonwealth Writers Prize and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award; Half of a Yellow Sun, which was the recipient of the Women's Prize for Fiction "Winner of Winners" award; Americanah, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award; the story collection The Thing Around Your Neck; the essays We Should All Be Feminists, Dear Ijeawele, or A Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions, and Notes on Grief; and Mama's Sleeping Scarf, a book for children. A recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, she divides her time between the United States and Nigeria.

Reviews

‘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' Sunday Times ‘Her particular gift is the seductive ability to tell a story…Adichie writes with an economy and precision that makes the strange seem familiar. She makes storytelling seem as easy as birdsong’ Telegraph ‘Adichie’s spare, poised prose, the coolness of her phrasing, ensures these scenes are achieved without melodrama. And though she writes very specifically about Nigeria, the stories have a universal application’ Financial Times ‘An elegant collection. From beginning to end the prose is serene and the characterization deft’ TLS ‘The powerful themes close to Adichie’s heart shine through, but never over-shadow writing of clarity and brilliance' Guardian

'"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

'Her particular gift is the seductive ability to tell a story...Adichie writes with an economy and precision that makes the strange seem familiar. She makes storytelling seem as easy as birdsong.' Jane Shilling, Telegraph

'Adichie's spare, poised prose, the coolness of her phrasing, ensures these scenes are achieved without melodrama. And though she writes very specifically about Nigeria, the stories have a universal application.' FT

'An elegant collection. From beginning to end the prose is serene and the characterization deft.' TLS

'The powerful themes close to Adichie's heart shine through, but never over-shadow writing of clarity and brilliance.' Aminatta Forna, Guardian

Adichie (Half of a Yellow Sun) stays on familiar turf in her deflated first story collection. The tension between Nigerians and Nigerian-Americans, and the question of what it means to be middle-class in each country, feeds most of these dozen stories. Best known are "Cell One," and "The Headstrong Historian," which have both appeared in the New Yorker and are the collection's finest works. "Cell One," in particular, about the appropriation of American ghetto culture by Nigerian university students, is both emotionally and intellectually fulfilling. Most of the other stories in this collection, while brimming with pathos and rich in character, are limited. The expansive canvas of the novel suits Adichie's work best; here, she fixates mostly on romantic relationships. Each story's observations illuminate once; read in succession, they take on a repetitive slice-of-life quality, where assimilation and gender roles become ready stand-ins for what could be more probing work. (June) Copyright 2009 Reed Business Information.