Michèle Roberts
Expressions of Exile
That Thing Around Your Neck
By Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Fourth Estate 217pp £14.99 order from our bookshop
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has already demonstrated her storytelling powers in her two novels, Purple Hibiscus and Half of a Yellow Sun, both published to great acclaim. This new book, a collection of short stories, displays more of her energetically driven narratives. She is a wonderfully ambitious writer in the tradition of the great Chinua Achebe, determined to analyse, describe and sum up whole countries. Her stories, like her characters, travel back and forth between Nigeria and the United States. Adichie has a strong voice and a lot to say.
Her protagonists all desire to be properly heard in a world that constantly misunderstands and misrepresents them. Adichie’s narrators are witnesses of political, domestic, and personal upheaval, sometimes acting as detached observers of social interactions, sometimes making a case for the validity of individual feelings. Sometimes a narrator
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