Teacher Guide

The Thing Around Your Neck Lesson Plan

Relationship to Other Books

Relevant works include any of Adichie's fiction, including Purple Hibiscus, Half of a Yellow Sun, and especially Americanah, which students will hear an excerpt of in the Day 4 activity, A Blog of Two Americas.

Things Fall Apart by Nigerian author Chinua Achebe is standard reading for many high school and college literature classes. Given that Adichie grew up in a house formerly occupied by Achebe and borrows names from many of his characters in her stories, any work by Achebe is relevant for comparison with Adichie's work.

It may be beneficial to briefly discuss Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad as a racially problematic text within the canon. The novel is mentioned in "Jumping Monkey...

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