One could almost be forgiven for forgetting that Chimananda Ngozie Adichie is a novelist. Well over a decade has passed since she published the best seller Americanah, about a young Nigerian woman’s confrontation with race and identity, which quickly secured a spot in the contemporary canon. The novel elevated Adichie to rare literary stardom—onto the cover of British Vogue, into a Beyoncé song. She continued to write but stuck to nonfiction—long essays on feminism and, more recently, on grief. Yet with the exception of a few short stories, she wasn’t producing much fiction. When I asked her during an interview two years ago about the long wait for a new novel, she said the question made her “go into a panic.”
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