The Things around your neck

Twelve dazzling short stories exploring the ties that bind men and women, parents and children, Africa and the United States: In ‘A Private Experience’, a medical student hides from a violent riot with a poor Muslim woman. The young mother in ‘Imitation’ finds her comfortable life in Philadelphia threatened when her husband moves his mistress into their Lagos home. The title story depicts the choking loneliness of a Nigerian girl in an America that is nothing like the country she expected.

Searing and profound, suffused with beauty, sorrow and longing, these stories map the collision of cultures and the deeply human struggle to reconcile them.