Chimamanda launches third book

The public presentation of ‘The Thing Around Your Neck’, the newest book of award winning author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie will hold at the Silverbird Galleria, Victoria Island, Lagos on Saturday, July 11 at 4pm.

The event comes on the heels of a successful reading tour of New York, Philadelphia, Boston, Aspen in Colorado, Dallas, Los Angeles, Seattle, San Francisco and Washington D.C., United States by the author.

Adichie’s Nigerian publisher, Farafina Books, is organising the event in collaboration with Silverbird Lifestyle Store.

The Farafina Week, a week-long celebration of Farafina Books will also be launched at the event, billed to attract the cream of Nigeria’s literati.

Released earlier in the United Kingdom by Fourth Estate and Knopf in the United States, ‘The Thing Around Your Neck’ is a collection of short stories described as “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.”

Born in 1977, Adichie announced her arrival on the literary scene in 2003 with her debut novel, ‘Purple Hibiscus’ which won the Commonwealth Writers’ Best First Book prize in 2005. She won the 2007 Orange Prize for Fiction with her second novel, ‘Half of a Yellow Sun.’ ‘The Thing Around Your Neck’ is her third effort and has been receiving positive reviews globally.

William Skidelsky of the UK Observer writes of the collection: “Superb. With minimal fuss [these stories] present snapshots of Nigerian life. . . . The title story tracks the life of a young woman sent to the US by her family . . . It is memorably, heartbreakingly sad . . . Both as a person and a writer, [Adichie] is engaged in an ongoing project of rebellion against the expectations of others—of those who want to be able to tell her what the world is like, and what her place in it should be.”

The Times Literary Supplement’s Anthony Cummins also says of the book: “Adichie grew up in Nigeria; she now lives in the United States. Several stories in her new book engineer a kind of moralizing comedy by viewing one country from the perspective of the other. . . . An elegant collection. From beginning to end the prose is serene and the characterization deft.”