Notes on Grief
CHIMAMANDA NGOZI ADICHIE
(FOURTH ESTATE, 96 PP, £10)
Tablet bookshop price £9 • tel 020 7799 4064

On the cover of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Notes on Grief, we see an image familiar to many of us who have spent the past year or more working from home, communicating with family and friends through the screen of a computer. In the image, a woman sits staring into her laptop, her face covered by her hands. From the opening page, we learn that the woman in the image must be the writer herself: her pose into the laptop signifying the acutely distressing way in which she learned of the death of her beloved father.

Expanded from an essay published in The New Yorker in September of last year, Notes on Grief is a book written from the raw state of loss, valuable in its testimony and its lack of ornament. Adichie’s essay is remarkable for the way it plunges straight into its subject, and explores the various ways in which the writer is “undone”. Its brevity, each chapter spanning only a few pages, gives the reader a sense of the spiralling, unanchored world of the mourner.