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Credit © Okey Adichie
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie was born in Nigeria in 1977.
She is from Abba, in Anambra State, but grew up in the university town of Nsukka
where she attended primary and secondary schools and briefly studied Medicine
and Pharmacy. She then moved to the United States to attend college, graduating
summa cum laude from Eastern Connecticut State with a major in Communication and
a minor in Political Science. She holds a Masters degree in Creative Writing
from Johns Hopkins.
Purple Hibiscus won the Commonwealth Writers' Prize and the Hurston/Wright
Legacy Award. It was also short-listed for the Orange Prize and the John
Llewellyn Rhys Prize and long-listed for the Booker Prize. Her short fiction has
appeared in Granta, Prospect, and The Iowa Review among other literary journals,
and she received an O. Henry Prize in 2003. She was a 2005-2006 Hodder Fellow at
Princeton, where she taught Introductory Fiction. She is presently pursuing
graduate work in the African Studies program at Yale. She divides her time
between the United States and Nigeria.
The Thing Around
Your Neck
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Amazon
Hardcover: 240 pages
Publisher: Knopf (June 16, 2009)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0307271072
ISBN-13: 978-0307271075
Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.9 x 1 inches
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.
 Half
of a Yellow Sun
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Knopf (September 12, 2006)
Click to order Paperback via
Amazon
Knopf (September 4, 2007)
Hardcover, 448 pages Paperback 560 pages
Category: Fiction - Literary
Language: English
Winner:
2007 Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction
A masterly, haunting new novel from a writer heralded by
The Washington Post Book World as “the 21st-century daughter of
Chinua Achebe,” Half of a Yellow Sun re-creates a seminal moment
in modern African history: Biafra’s impassioned struggle to establish an
independent republic in Nigeria in the 1960s, and the chilling violence
that followed.
With astonishing empathy and the effortless grace of a
natural storyteller, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie weaves together the lives
of three characters swept up in the turbulence of the decade.
Thirteen-year-old Ugwu is employed as a houseboy for a university
professor full of revolutionary zeal. Olanna is the professor’s
beautiful mistress, who has abandoned her life of privilege in Lagos for
a dusty university town and the charisma of her new lover. And Richard
is a shy young Englishman in thrall to Olanna’s twin sister, an
enigmatic figure who refuses to belong to anyone. As Nigerian troops
advance and the three must run for their lives, their ideals are
severely tested, as are their loyalties to one another.
Epic, ambitious, and triumphantly realized, Half of a
Yellow Sun is a remarkable novel about moral responsibility, about
the end of colonialism, about ethnic allegiances, about class and
race—and the ways in which love can complicate them all. Adichie
brilliantly evokes the promise and the devastating disappointments that
marked this time and place, bringing us one of the most powerful,
dramatic, and intensely emotional pictures of modern Africa that we have
ever had.
Purple
Hibiscus
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Paperback, Pages: 320
Category: Fiction - Literary
Publisher: HarperPerennial (February 7, 2005)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0007189885
The limits of fifteen–year–old Kambili's world are
defined by the high walls of her family estate and the dictates of her
repressive and fanatically religious father. Her life is regulated by
schedules: prayer, sleep, study, and more prayer.
When Nigeria begins to fall apart during a military
coup, Kambili's father, involved mysteriously in the political crisis,
sends Kambili and her brother away to live with their aunt. In this
house, full of energy and laughter, she discovers life and love – and a
terrible, bruising secret deep within her family.
Centring on the promise of freedom and the pain and
exhilaration of adolescence, Purple Hibiscus is the extraordinary debut
of a remarkable new talent.
Critical Praise
‘An intoxicating story that is at once distinctively feminine,
African and universal.’ - Hepzibah Anderson, Observer
‘It’s a mature coming-of-age story, and an engrossing portrait of
Nigerian society.’ - The Times
‘This is the best new novel to have come out of Africa in some years.
Like its young protagonist, it is a work of undemonstrative but rare
feeling and intelligence; and it gives us one of the most fascinating
and perturbing patriarchs of recent literature. But its special magic
lies in conveying that, however devastated a childhood might be, it
still has an unrepeatable, dream-like quality’. - Amit Chaudhuri
Proverbs For The
People: Contemporary African-American Stories
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Amazon
Paperback: 512 pages
Publisher: Kensington (July 1, 2004)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0758202873
Forward by
Jewell
Parker Rhodes, Edited by
Tracey
Price Thompson and TeRessa Stoval with
Pearl Cleage,
Donna Hill, Parry
"Ebony Satin" Brown,
Omar Tyree and others
If you can walk, you can dance. If you can talk, you can sing."
"Don't start none, won't be none." "If you don't stand for something
you'll fall for anything." Whether it was in the church on a hard-shined
wooden pew, or around the kitchen table after, listening to the wisdom
of mothers and fathers, aunts and uncles, grandparents, friends, and
leaders, the messages of the proverbs resonate in the souls of most
African-Americans—a sweet refrain heard through striving, reaching,
loving, and living. In this powerful collection of stories based on
African, African-American, and Biblical proverbs, some of today's most
exciting new African-American writers tackle the unifying themes,
delicious wit and undeniable wisdom of the proverbs, making them sing
for a whole new generation.
In the moving "Love Can Move Mountains," author Elizabeth Atkins Bowman
explores the meaning of the African-American saying, "Mountain, get out
of my way!" in a story about the miraculous, mysterious power of a
mother's stand-firm love. In Arethia Hornsby's "My Momma Said…," two
friends go out on the town and get schooled in a life lesson that proves
the truth behind the ages-old African-American proverb, "Never judge a
book by its cover." Town gossip gets the best of a loyal wife and gives
credence to C.F. Pope's saying, "Never declare war unless you mean to do
battle," in Gwynne
Forster's wry tale of comeuppance, "First Thing Monday Morning." And
in the flirty short story, "Something Special," Venise Berry shows what
the Cape Verde Islands maxim, "Every week has its Friday" really means
as one woman's weekly ritual promises seven days' worth of sensual
satisfaction.
In addition to such established writers as Pearl Cleage, Omar Tyree,
Margaret Johnson-Hodge, Timmothy McCann,
Brandon
Massey, Kambon Obayani, Earl Sewell, Maxine Thompson, and others,
here, too, are rising stars in the African-American literary world,
including fourteen-year-old Kharel Price and fifteen-year-old Tierra
French, proving that the wisdom of the past lives on in the next
generation.
From the struggle to break the chains of the past, (Pat
G'Orge-Walker's "The Consequence") to the fight to keep hope alive
in the face of injustice, (Robert
Fleming's "A Crisis of Faith"), from the joys of loving an older
woman (Parry "Ebony Satin" Brown's "Ain't Nobody's Business If I Do"),
to an African man's discovery of his own America (Chimamanda
Ngozi Adichie's "Women Here Drive Buses"), this triumphant, stirring
anthology is a glorious reminder of the power of proverbs to heal, to
provoke, to unify, and to inspire.
Related Links
http://www.halfofayellowsun.com/
http://www.l3.ulg.ac.be/adichie/
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