Notes on Grief by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Henry Prize Stories, the Financial Times, and Zoetrope.

Her work has been translated into over thirty languages and has appeared in various publications, including The New Yorker, Granta, The O. Notes on Grief is a book for this moment-a work readers will treasure and share now more than ever-and yet will prove durable and timeless, an indispensable addition to Adichie's canon.Ĭhimamanda Ngozi Adichie grew up in Nigeria. In the compact format of We Should All Be Feminists and Dear Ijeawele, Adichie delivers a gem of a book-a book that fundamentally connects us to one another as it probes one of the most universal human experiences. With signature precision of language, and glittering, devastating detail on the page-and never without touches of rich, honest humor-Adichie weaves together her own experience of her father’s death with threads of his life story, from his remarkable survival during the Biafran war, through a long career as a statistics professor, into the days of the pandemic in which he’d stay connected with his children and grandchildren over video chat from the family home in Abba, Nigeria. She writes about being one of the millions of people grieving this year about the familial and cultural dimensions of grief and also about the loneliness and anger that are unavoidable in it.

As the COVID-19 pandemic raged around the world, and kept Adichie and her family members separated from one another, her father succumbed unexpectedly to complications of kidney failure.Įxpanding on her original New Yorker piece, Adichie shares how this loss shook her to her core. Notes on Grief is an exquisite work of meditation, remembrance, and hope, written in the wake of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's beloved father’s death in the summer of 2020.

Notes on Grief by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie