The Thing Around Your Neck

From the prizewinning author of Half of a Yellow Sun (“A gorgeous, pitiless account of love, violence, and betrayal”—Time; “Instantly enthralling”—The New York Times) twelve dazzling stories—her most intimate work to date—in which she turns her penetrating eye on the ties that bind men and women, parents and children, Nigeria 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, this collection is a resounding confirmation of Adichie’s prodigious literary powers.