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.

 

Americanah
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Hardcover: 352 pages
Publisher: Knopf (May 14, 2013)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0307271080
ISBN-13: 978-0307271082

As teenagers in a Lagos secondary school, Ifemelu and Obinze fall in love. Their Nigeria is under military dictatorship, and people are fleeing the country if they can. Ifemelu—beautiful, self-assured—departs for America to study. She suffers defeats and triumphs, finds and loses relationships and friendships, all the while feeling the weight of something she never thought of back home: race. Obinze—the quiet, thoughtful son of a professor—had hoped to join her, but post-9/11 America will not let him in, and he plunges into a dangerous, undocumented life in London. Fifteen years later, Obinze is a wealthy man in a newly democratic Nigeria, while Ifemelu has achieved success as a writer of an eye-opening blog about race in America. But when Ifemelu returns to Nigeria, and she and Obinze reignite their shared passion—for their homeland and for each other—they will face the toughest decisions of their lives.

 

The Thing Around Your Neck
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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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(September 12, 2006)

Click to order Paperback via Amazon
(September 4, 2007)

Publisher: Knopf
Hardcover, 448 pages
Paperback 560 pages  
Category: Fiction - Literary

 

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

Adichie 's work is included in the following anthologies:

The Best African American Fiction (2009)
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Paperback: 336 pages
Publisher: Bantam (January 13, 2009)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0553385348
ISBN-13: 978-0553385342
Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.1 x 1 inches

Introducing the first volume in an exciting new annual anthology featuring the year's most outstanding fiction by some of today's finest African American writers.

From stories that depict black life in times gone by to those that address contemporary issues, this inaugural volume gathers the very best recent African American fiction. Created during a period of electrifying political dialogue and cultural, social, and economic change that is sure to captivate the imaginations of writers and readers for years to come, these short stories and novel excerpts explore a rich variety of subjects. But most of all, they represent exceptional artistry.

Here youill find work by both established names and up-and-comers, ranging from Walter Dean Myers to Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Mat Johnson, and Junot Diaz. They write about subjects as diverse as the complexities of black middle-class life and the challenges of interracial relationships, a modern-day lynching in the South and a young musician's coming-of-age during the Harlem Renaissance. What unites these stories, whether set in suburbia, in eighteenth-century New York City, or on a Caribbean island that is supposed to be "brown skin paradise," is their creators' passionate engagement with matters of the human heart.

Masterful and engaging, this first volume of Best African American Fiction features stories you'll want to savor, share, and return to again and again.

 

Proverbs For The People: Contemporary African-American Stories
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Paperback: 512 pages
Publisher: Kensington (July 1, 2004)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0758202873

Forward by Jewell Parker Rhodes, Edited by Tracey Price Thompson and TaRessa 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/