February 11, 2021, 10:03am
This morning, Reagan Arthur, Executive Vice President and Publisher of Knopf, announced Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s next book, Notes on Grief. The book, which Knopf will publish on May 11 of this year, is an expansion of her essay of the same title, which was published last September in The New Yorker.
“This book fundamentally connects us to one another as it probes one of the most universal of human experiences,” said Arthur in a press release. “Notes on Grief is a book for this moment—a work readers will treasure and share now more than ever—and yet it will prove to be durable and timeless.”
The publisher describes the book as “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. . . . 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 meantime, you can read the original essay here.