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.
