Author: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Published: 2009
Genre: Fiction
I read this book in two days...I do enjoy short stories at times, it makes the progress faster and there is always the next story to look forward to if you are not particularly engrossed by one story. I first read Purple Hibiscus three years ago and fell in love with Adichie's writing. The Thing Around Your Neck is a collection of stories previously published in various publications. It tells of immigrant Nigerians, professionals, students, wives carving their way in the land of opportunity, America.
The collection is filled with everything from the wife in a long-distance marriage realising that she is surely losing her husband to another woman in another country. 'The Shivering' is story of a post-graduate student still pining after a lost love or the idea of her lost love, while sharing her woes with her Nigerian neighbour. 'The Arrangers of Marriage' and 'The Thing Around Your Neck' were reminiscent of some of the stories written by Jhumpa Lahiri in Interpreter of Maladies- the unease in a new culture, the desperation to fit in and the stories of immigrants clutching at their identity in the New World. 'The Headstrong Historian' had real similarities with Arthur Japin's 'Two hearts of Kwasi Boachi'- a historical fiction that told of the conflicts of the Slave Trade.
I will be reading more of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie for as long as she keeps telling the stories she tells.
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