The Thing Around Your Neck

From Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, the Orange Prize-winning author of “Half of a Yellow Sun” and “Purple Hibiscus”, comes twelve stories in which she turns her eye on the ties that bind men and women, parents and children, Nigeria and the West. 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. Immediate and profound, full of beauty, sorrow and longing, this collection is a superb addition to the already impress canon of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.