Notes on Grief

(Hardback)

Available Formats

Publishing Details

Classifications

Physical Properties

Description

A devastating essay on loss and the people we love from Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, the bestselling author ofAmericanahandHalf 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.

Reviews

Praise for Notes on Grief

Both emotional and austere, a work of dignity and of unravelling Guardian

With raw eloquence, Adichies observations have, simultaneously, an academic detachment and an inescapable anguish at being in the centre of this churning with porous edges that there is no way through Notes on Griefis both achingly personal and stunningly familiar to anyone who has felt that scattering Independent

An exquisite howl of pain written in the aftermath, last year, of the unexpected death of her father Telgraph

Notes on Griefis a moving account of a daughters sorrow and it is also a love letter to the one who has gone. She is saying dont go and she is saying goodbye and she is also saying sorry Observer

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 It is no salve for her own grief, but Adichies 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 wroteA Grief Observedof the year after the death of his wife; in 2005 Joan Didion wroteThe Year of Magical Thinkingabout the same time span after the death of her husband. Into this tradition fallsNotes on GriefbyChimamanda 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 Bio

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.