Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: ‘For so long, we’ve seen history through the eyes of men’

“One of the things I like about this novel is how it’s very honest about women’s sexuality. This is a novel about how women’s choices are so limited by what society demands of women. But also, it’s about a sense of community and colonial Lagos.”

“This is fundamentally a book about how there’s a data gap in the world with everything, data gap between men and women. Reading this book, was very eye opening, and also taught to me a lot. You will read the book and you cannot at the end of it still claim that that our world has not been shaped by sexism.”

“I adore Elizabeth Hardwick because she just writes the best sentences. That’s it, really. She writes about things in a personal way, without making those things about her. And so you get a sense of the person that she was… when she’s making a case for something, it’s very clear. At the end of it, you know what she’s saying.”

“I read this in my first year in the U.S., in 1998. There’s a story in there called ‘The Management of Grief’, a subtle, beautiful moving story about a woman numb from grief. I remember reading it thinking this is the kind of story I want to write, I want to write a story that resonates with people. I think that the best compliment for a story is when a reader doesn’t forget it, and I just haven’t been able to forget Bharati Mukherjee’s story.”

“The reason I loved this book is how important it is for us to see history through the eyes of women. Because for so long, we’ve seen history through the eyes of men. And obviously, seeing it through the eyes of men is important, because then we tell the full story, but the story is not complete, unless we’ve heard it from, from the point of view of women.”