Genre: Short Stories, African literature

Narrative style: Varies

Published: 2008

Rating 4/5

Format: Hardback

Synopsis: Adichie tells the stories of Nigerians, in Africa and the USA. They are tales of sorrow and longing, about the clash of cultures and the struggle to reconcile them.

Time on Shelf: I inherited this from my husband’s aunt in 2014 so a long time. I’m not a huge fan of short stories so that put me off reading it sooner.

Reading challenges: TBR Challenge Yr 10 – hosted by Roof Beam Reader

I really enjoyed the stories in this collection. As always, my struggle with short stories is I always want more and Adichie’s characters are well drawn and vivid, their situations compelling. Any of them could have been a novel I would have happily read. It may seem harsh to not give five stars but every time I finished a story, I felt a sense of loss that I wasn’t going to be able to read more.

Adichie’s stories look at the lives of Nigerians, both in Africa and in the US. They look at tradition, at prejudice, at relationships and culture. The stories are compassionate, emotional without being sentimental and look closely at human nature. The best stories are those that look at the clash between cultures, be it between races, between the sexes or between the generations.

‘Jumping Monkey Hill’ is perhaps my favourite story. A young writer goes to a retreat in Cape Town with other African writers. The retreat is run by a white British man who feels he knows best about what the young Africans should be writing about and how. He is incredibly patronising to the narrator and has preconceived ideas about her. He is only interested in writing that fits with his Western ideas of what African writers should be like.

Other highlights are ‘The American Embassy’ about a women trying to apply for asylum after the murder of her son, ‘The Arrangers of Marriage’ where a woman joins her husband in America and is disappointed when she finds her new husband has abandoned his Nigerian roots and ‘The Headstrong Historian’ where a woman believes her husband was killed by her cousins to get her land and sends her son to be educated by missionaries in an attempt to get it back.

I really enjoyed this collection and will certainly be reading Americanah soon.