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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.

THINGS FALL APART tells two overlapping, intertwining stories, both of which center around Okonkwo, a “strong man” of an Ibo village in Nigeria. The first of these stories traces Okonkwo’s fall from grace with the tribal world in which he lives, and in its classical purity of line and economical beauty it provides us with a powerful fable about the immemorial conflict between the individual and society.

The second story, which is as modern as the first is ancient, and which elevates the book to a tragic plane, concerns the clash of cultures and the destruction of Okonkwo’s world through the arrival of aggressive, proselytizing European missionaries. These twin dramas are perfectly harmonized, and they are modulated by an awareness capable of encompassing at once the life of nature, human history, and the mysterious compulsions of the soul. THINGS FALL APART is the most illuminating and permanent monument we have to the modern African experience as seen from within