The Thing Around Your Neck

By: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Narrated by: Adjoa Andoh

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie burst onto the literary scene with her remarkable debut novel, Purple Hibiscus, which critics hailed as “one of the best novels to come out of Africa in years” (Baltimore Sun), with “prose as lush as the Nigerian landscape that it powerfully evokes” (The Boston Globe); The Washington Post called her “the twenty-first-century daughter of Chinua Achebe.” Her award-winning Half of a Yellow Sun became an instant classic upon its publication three years later, once again putting her tremendous gifts—graceful storytelling, knowing compassion, and fierce insight into her characters’ hearts—on display. Now, in her most intimate and seamlessly crafted work to date, Adichie turns her penetrating eye on not only Nigeria but America, in twelve dazzling stories that explore the ties that bind men and women, parents and children, Africa 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, these stories map, with Adichie’s signature emotional wisdom, the collision of two cultures and the deeply human struggle to reconcile them. The Thing Around Your Neck is a resounding confirmation of the prodigious literary powers of one of our most essential writers.

Fantastic stories

This book was such a gift because each story within it was different. It was as if I read many different books. I loved the narration too. The stories vary from sad to heartwarming to funny. I highly recommend this book.

Worth a Second Listen

There is so much going on in these exquisitely crafted stories that I am going to listen to them a second time to pick up anything I had missed. There is both a beauty and a sadness in these stories about the African immigrant experience when I reflect on what is currently happening to immigrants. There is tension not only between African and American cultures but between the various African language and tribal groups. Adichie mines these tensions to tell her twelve tales where the African oral tradition lives in the twenty-first century in a new form and before a new audience. Stories like “American Embassy” are poignant and reflect a time that has recently passed because you are unlikely to hear new immigrant stories like these because the rules have changed and it’s even harder to immigrate to America now. Worth a second listen.

Mixed feelings about the audiobook

All of the stories are very well-written and I liked hearing them performed because hearing them in the accent in which they were written was an experience I could not create reading them in a physical book. However, the breaks between the stories was so brief that I sometimes had a difficult time telling where one story ended and another began, so I feel like the impact of each story was a little lost on me. I would almost like to read the book again in print so I could do the stories justice.

Extraordinary

Great imagery
Narration was better than my attempt at reading the name's. Great voice actor ands characterizations

Hey set of emblematic short stories by a great writer.

Many facets of Nigerian and Nigerian American life are explored and much more with a depth and detail and soulfulness that exults the spirit and informs the mind.