The Thing Around Your Neck - Softcover

Praise for ‘Half of a Yellow Sun’

'I look with awe and envy at this young woman from Africa who is recording the history of her country. She is fortunate - and we, her readers, are even luckier.' Edmund White

'Here is a new writer endowed with the gift of ancient storytellers.' Chinua Achebe

'Heartbreaking, funny, exquisitely written and, without doubt, a literary masterpiece and a classic.' Daily Mail

‘Stunning. It has a ramshackle freedom and exuberant ambition.' Observer

'Vividly written, thrumming with life...a remarkable novel. In its compassionate intelligence as in its capacity for intimate portraiture, this novel is a worthy successor to such twentieth-century classics as Chinua Achebe's "Things Fall Apart" and V.S. Naipaul's "A Bend in the River".' Joyce Carol Oates

'Rarely have I felt so there, in the middle of all that suffering. I wasted the last fifty pages, reading them far too greedily and fast, because I couldn't bear to let go...It is a magnificent second novel - and can't fail to find the readership it deserves and demands.' Margaret Forster

'This magnificent novel is a gripping portrayal of the horrors of war...A major new African voice.' Independent

The new collection of stories from the Orange Prize-winning author of ‘Purple Hibiscus’ and ‘Half of a Yellow Sun’.

The first work from Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie since her bestselling, prize-winning and phenomenally successful Richard and Judy pick 'Half of a Yellow Sun'. Told with the vividness and insight that make her novels exceptional, these are stories of universal conflicts - between culture, gender, responsibility and identity.

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 threatened when she learns that her husband back in Lagos has moved his mistress into their 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 re-examine them.

Searing and profound, suffused with beauty, sorrow and longing, this collection is a resounding confirmation of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's prodigious storytelling powers.