Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

For our fifth annual 60 Notable Books of the Year list, we invited the literary culture critic Tolu Daniel as guest curator, to make 45 picks. He surveys “a prose landscape in search of quieter, more patient forms,” poetry “less a lyric refuge than a site of confrontation,” and “a shift towards visibility culture” where “books now circulate as events, images, and metrics long before they are encountered as texts.”

Coming 12 years after her third novel Americanah, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s vital, splintered return to longform fiction shows classes of womanhood. It demonstrates yet again her elegant, unmatched grasp of language. In some ways, it is also different from her previous novels.