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and would go to London and to Paris and to Onicha, sifting through moldy files in archives, reimagining the lives and smells of her grandmother’s world, for the book she would write called Pacifying with Bullets: A Reclaimed History of Southern Nigeria. It was Grace who, in a conversation about the early manuscript with her fiancé, George Chikadibia—stylish graduate of Kings College, Lagos; engineer-to-be; wearer of three-piece suits; expert ballroom dancer who often said that a grammar school without Latin was like a cup of tea without sugar—knew that the marriage would not last when George told her she was misguided to write about primitive culture instead of a worthwhile topic like African Alliances in the American-Soviet Tension. They would divorce in 1972, not because of the four miscarriages Grace had suffered but because she woke up sweating one night and realized that she would strangle him to death if she had to listen to one more rapturous monologue about his Cambridge days. It was Grace who, as she received faculty prizes, as she spoke to solemn-faced people at conferences about the Ijaw and Ibibio and Igbo and Efik peoples of Southern Nigeria, as she wrote reports for international organizations about commonsense things for which she nevertheless received generous pay, would imagine her grandmother looking on and chuckling with great amusement. It was Grace who, feeling an odd rootlessness in the later years of her life, surrounded by her awards, her friends, her garden of peerless roses, would go to the courthouse in Lagos and officially change her first name from Grace to Afamefuna.

But on that day as she sat at her grandmother’s bedside in the fading evening light, Grace was not contemplating her future. She simply held her grandmother’s hand, the palm thickened from years of making pottery.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Thank you to Sarah Chalfant, Robin Desser, and Mitzi Angel.

The following stories have been previously published: “Jumping Monkey Hill” in Granta 95: Loved Ones; “On Monday of Last Week” in Granta 98: The Deep End; “The Arrangers of Marriage” as “New Husband” in Iowa Review; “Cell One” and “The Headstrong Historian” in The New Yorker; “Imitation” in Other Voices; “The American Embassy” in Prism Inter national; “The Thing Around Your Neck” in Prospect 99; “Tomorrow Is Too Far” in Prospect 118; “A Private Experience” in Virginia Quarterly Review; and “Ghosts” in Zoetrope: All-Story. “The American Embassy” also appeared in The O. Henry Prize Stories 2003, edited by Laura Furman (Anchor Books, 2003).

A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie grew up in Nigeria. Her work has been translated into thirty languages and has appeared in various publications, including The New Yorker, Granta, the Financial Times, and Zoetrope. Her story “The American Embassy” was included in The O. Henry Prize Stories 2003. Her most recent novel, Half of a Yellow Sun, won the Orange Prize and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; it was a New York Times Notable Book and a People and Black Issues Book Review Best Book of the Year. Her first novel, Purple Hibiscus, won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award. A recipient of a 2008 MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, she divides her time between the United States and Nigeria.

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Also by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Half of a Yellow Sun

Purple Hibiscus

Copyright

First published in Great Britain in 2009 by

Fourth Estate

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

77–85 Fulham Palace Road

London W6 8JB

www.4thestate.co.uk

Simultaneously published in the United States by Knopf

Visit our authors’ blog: www.fifthestate.co.uk

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Copyright © Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie 2009

The right of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

A catalogue record for this book is available