The Blog: July 2009

FARAFINA BOOKS & SILVERBIRD LIFESTYLE STORE PRESENT “THE THING AROUND YOUR NECK”

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie will be in Nigeria in July to promote her new book,The Thing Around Your Neck. Published locally by Farafina Books, The Thing Around Your Neck is a collection of short stories exploring the ties that bind men and women, parents and children, Africa and the United States. Searing and profound, suffused with beauty, sorrow, and longing, these stories map, with Adichie’s signature wisdom, the collision of cultures and the deeply human struggle to reconcile them.Award-winning author ofPurple Hibiscus and Half of a Yellow Sun, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has been described as “the 21st century daughter of Chinua Achebe.” Her much-anticipated public presentation ofThe Thing Around Your Neck will hold on

SATURDAY JULY 11TH AT 3PM, at:
THE SILVERBIRD LIFESTYLE STORE,
SILVERBIRD GALLERIA,
AHMADU BELLO WAY,
VICTORIA ISLAND, LAGOS

About The Thing Around Your Neck

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie burst onto the literary scene with her remarkable debut novel,Purple Hibiscus, which critics hailed as “one of the best novels to come out of Africa in years” (BaltimoreSun), with “prose as lush as the Nigerian landscape that it powerfully evokes” (The Boston Globe);The Washington Post called her “the twenty-first-century daughter of Chinua Achebe.” Her award-winningHalf of a Yellow Sun became an instant classic upon its publication three years later, once again putting her tremendous gifts—graceful storytelling, knowing compassion, and fierce insight into her characters’ hearts—on display. Now, in her most intimate and seamlessly crafted work to date, Adichie turns her penetrating eye on not only Nigeria but America, in twelve dazzling stories that explore the ties that bind men and women, parents and children, Africa and the United States.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 center of “Imitation” finds her comfortable life in Philadelphia threatened when she learns that her husband has moved his mistress into their Lagos 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 reexamine them.Searing and profound, suffused with beauty, sorrow, and longing, these stories map, with Adichie’s signature emotional wisdom, the collision of two cultures and the deeply human struggle to reconcile them.The Thing Around Your Neck is a resounding confirmation of the prodigious literary powers of one of our most essential writers.

About the Author

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie grew up in Nigeria. Her work has been translated into thirty languages and has appeared in various publications, includingThe O. Henry Prize Stories, 2003; The New Yorker; Granta; the Financial Times;and Zoetrope. Her most recent novel, Half of a Yellow Sun, won the Orange Broadband Prize and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; it was aNew York Times Notable Book and a People and Black Issues Book ReviewBest Book of the Year. Her first novel, Purple Hibiscus, won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award. A recipient of a 2008 MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, she divides her time between the United States and Nigeria.