Knopf to Publish New Book by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie in May
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Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, bestselling author of Americanah and other acclaimed works, has written a timely and deeply personal book that will be published by Knopf on May 11. NOTES ON GRIEF, a work of meditation, remembrance, and hope, written in the wake of her father’s death, grew out of an essay that originally appeared in The New Yorker. The announcement was made today by Reagan Arthur, Executive Vice President and Publisher of Knopf.
Last summer, as the COVID-19 pandemic raged around the world and kept her family members separated from one another, Adichie’s father succumbed unexpectedly to complications of kidney failure. In NOTES ON GRIEF, Adichie shares how this loss shook her to her core. She writes about being one of the millions of people grieving this year, about the familial and cultural dimensions of grief, and also about the loneliness and anger that accompany it. Adichie weaves together her own experience of her father’s death with threads of his life story —from his survival of the Biafran War, through a long career as a statistics professor, into the days of the pandemic, during which he’d stay connected to his children and grandchildren over video chats from the family home in Abba, Nigeria. As Adichie wrestles with his passing, she recalls her father as a remarkable man of kindness and charm, and a fierce supporter of his youngest daughter.
“This book fundamentally connects us to one another as it probes one of the most universal of human experiences,” said Arthur. “NOTES ON GRIEF is a book for this moment—a work readers will treasure and share now more than ever—and yet it will prove to be durable and timeless.”
Adichie grew up in Nigeria. Her work has been translated into thirty languages. In addition to Americanah, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, Adichie is also the author of the novels Purple Hibiscus and Half of a Yellow Sun; a story collection, The Thing Around Your Neck; and the nonfiction books We Should All Be Feminists and Dear Ijeawele, or a Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions. A recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, Adichie divides her time between the United States and Nigeria.