Family and exile in Adichie's The Thing Around Your Neck

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's The Thing Around Your Neck (2009) is a collection of twelve short stories. The settings of the stories are both in Nigeria and America. Adichie tries to analyse and study the psychology of Nigerian characters who settled in America and she explores their agonies, struggles and hardships. She appreciates their struggle and praises their determination and courage. The collection also reveals the human desires and unavoidable depressions which binds the people of the two countries together. Family and exile are recurring ideas in the collection. By compulsion or choice her characters live away from home. They are alienated from their familiar place and culture by violence, fear or the hope of a better life. However the stories which are directly not related with physical exile, they have an idea of the changing boundaries of the self. Adichie's birthplace Nigeria has great significance in the collection: the place from where her characters set off to pursue education and wealth in far distant places, the home for which they desire strongly when they are away.