The Thing Around Your Neck by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
The NCN Book Club’s January read was a stunning short story collection, The Thing Around Your Neck by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, author of the best seller Americanah.
As in Americanah, Adichie writes about Nigeria and the Nigerian immigrant experience, but her characters’ jingling anxiety and sense of displacement are timeless.
From the first page of this book, I was completely engrossed. Adichie brilliantly packs an entire world, so unlike my own, into a few pages. Because her stories are so immersive, you can enjoy a novel-like experience in 20+ pages, ideal for 21C attention spans.
WHAT OTHER REVIEWERS SAY
Vanity Fair: “The stories in The Thing Around Your Neck are so exquisite they grab you by the throat and stop your heart.”
WHO WROTE IT
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie grew up in Nigeria. Her work has been translated into thirty languages and has appeared in various publications, including The New Yorker, Granta, and the Financial Times. She is the author of the novels Purple Hibiscus, Half of a Yellow Sun, which won the Orange Prize, and Americanah which won the 2013 U.S. National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction. In 2012 she delivered a TED talk entitled “We Should All Be Feminists” which has over 4.5 million views and sparked a worldwide conversation about feminism. She is a recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship and divides her time between the United States and Nigeria.