Description

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

Publisher Review

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