Koku Baboni By Kola Onadipe

Twelve dazzling short stories exploring 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.

The young mother in ‘Imitation’ finds her comfortable life in Philadelphia threatened when her husband moves his mistress into their Lagos home. The title story depicts the choking loneliness of a Nigerian girl in an America that is nothing like the country she expected.

Searing and profound, suffused with beauty, sorrow, and longing, these stories map the collision of 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.

An epic story of love and civil war set in Nigeria during the 1960s, Half of a Yellow Sun recounts the lives of three characters caught up in events larger than themselves. Ugwu, a young houseboy working for an idealistic university professor. Olanna, the professor’s mistress, and Richard, a British expatriate in love with Olanna’s twin sister, Kainene. Their relationships are thrown into jeopardy when Richard spends one drunken night with Olanna, and as the war escalates.

With Half of a Yellow Sun, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie firmly establishes herself as a most powerful storyteller and humanist, ”the 21st-century daughter of Chinua Achebe,” according to The Washington Post Book World.

The book has won numerous awards and accolades worldwide, including the Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction in 2007.