**From the globally acclaimed, best-selling novelist and author of
We Should All Be Feminists, a timely and deeply personal account of
the loss of her father: "With raw eloquence, Notes on Grief ...
captures the bewildering messiness of loss in a society that requires
serenity, when you'd rather just scream. Grief is impolite ... Adichie's
words put welcome, authentic voice to this most universal of emotions,
which is also one of the most universally avoided" (The Washington
Post).
Notes on Grief is an exquisite work of meditation, remembrance, and
hope, written in the wake of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's beloved father's
death in the summer of 2020. As the COVID-19 pandemic raged around the
world, and kept Adichie and her family members separated from one
another, her father succumbed unexpectedly to complications of kidney
failure.
Expanding on her original New Yorker piece, 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 are unavoidable in
it. With signature precision of language, and glittering, devastating
detail on the page--and never without touches of rich, honest
humor--Adichie weaves together her own experience of her father's death
with threads of his life story, from his remarkable survival during the
Biafran war, through a long career as a statistics professor, into the
days of the pandemic in which he'd stay connected with his children and
grandchildren over video chat from the family home in Abba, Nigeria.
In the compact format of We Should All Be Feminists and Dear
Ijeawele, Adichie delivers a gem of a book--a book that fundamentally
connects us to one another as it probes one of the most universal human
experiences. Notes on Grief is a book for this moment--a work readers
will treasure and share now more than ever--and yet will prove durable
and timeless, an indispensable addition to Adichie's canon.
