Overview

A devastating essay on loss and the people we love from Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, the bestselling author of Americanah and Half of a Yellow Sun. 'Grief is a cruel kind of education. You learn how ungentle mourning can be, how full of anger. You learn how glib condolences can feel. You learn how much grief is about language, the failure of language and the grasping for language' On 10 June 2020, the scholar James Nwoye Adichie died suddenly in Nigeria. In this tender and powerful essay, expanded from the original New Yorker text, his daughter, a self-confessed daddy's girl, remembers her beloved father. Notes on Grief is at once a tribute to a long life of grace and wisdom, the story of a daughter's fierce love for a parent, and a revealing examination of the layers of loss and the nature of grief. 'A work of dignity and of unravelling’ GUARDIAN ‘An exquisite howl of pain’ TELEGRAPH

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9780008470302

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Reviews

Praise for Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: 'Take note world ... When Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie tells you to listen, you listen' Stylist 'Here is a new writer endowed with the gift of ancient storytellers' Chinua Achebe 'Adiche [has] virtuosity, boundless empathy and searing social acuity' Dave Eggers 'Her writing is clear-eyed and fresh, her characters simply drawn ... Adichie writes with a cool detachment that allows her to plunder grief and stereotype to brilliant effect' Times 'She is a sharp observer, with a gift for capturing those aspects of culture that seem entirely normal to Africans and Americans' Sunday Times

Praise for Notes on Grief 'Notes on Grief is a moving account of a daughter's sorrow and it is also a love letter to the one who has gone. Adichie wants him back; she wants to rescue him from death and to tell him once again how much she adored him. She is saying don't go and she is saying goodbye and she is also saying sorry - for the writing of grief is to acknowledge an ending and, thus, as Jacques Derrida had it, as soon as you write, you are asking for forgiveness' Observer 'That grief of mine, no longer singular, was subsumed in the collective wail. That is, until Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's visceral exploration of her own father's unexpected death that month. In 30 short sections, Notes on Grief lays a path by which we might mourn our individual traumas among the aggregate suffering of this harrowing time.' New York Times 'Feels raw, even for a book about grief. Some wait years to preserve these thoughts; Adichie is examining them now, constantly stepping into her grief and then, with the same feet, twisting away again to look at herself and examine what is happening to her... It is no salve for her own grief, but Adichie's brave observance of her own pain, will be a gift to those also suffering their first year of loss in these strange times' iNews When you send a great writer into the valley of the dead, the reportage is better quality. In 1961 CS Lewis wrote A Grief Observed of the year after the death of his wife; in 2005 Joan Didion wrote The Year of Magical Thinking about the same time span after the death of her husband. Into this tradition falls Notes on Grief by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie ... For fans of the famously private Adichie - this is fascinatingly intimate. It is also delivered in the most readable, tender bites for any of the many of us whose attention has been shot by the harrowing of this past year' The Times

Author Information

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is the author of Purple Hibiscus, which was longlisted for the Booker Prize, Half of a Yellow Sun, which won the Orange Prize for Fiction; and acclaimed story collection The Thing Around Your Neck. Americanah, was published around the world in 2013, received numerous awards and was named one of New York Times Ten Books of the Year. A recipient of a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, she divides her time between the United States and Nigeria.

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