Following her father’s death last year, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie wrote a reflection in The New Yorker titled “Notes on Grief.” Now she has expanded the memoir into a book-length work—chapbook, likely—that explores collective grief during the pandemic, “the familial and cultural dimensions of grief, and the loneliness and anger that accompany it.” It will center her father’s life, “a remarkable man of kindness and charm” who survived the Biafran War of 1967-70 and was Nigeria’s first professor of statistics.
Professor James Nwoye Adichie’s stories of the Biafran War were among Adichie’s sources for her monumental second novel Half of a Yellow Sun. He died from kidney failure.
Adichie’s UK publisher 4th Estate describes the memoir as “a timely and deeply personal … work of meditation, remembrance and hope.”
It is, “a moving tribute to the father Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie loved fiercely and whose sudden death devastated her,” 4th Estate editor Nick Pearson told The Guardian. “It will be treasured by readers for the light it sheds on the pain of navigating the loss of someone we love.”
Notes on Grief will be published by 4th Estate on 11 May 2021.