Dear Ijeawele, or a Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions (Hardback)

I have some suggestions for how to raise Chizalum. But remember that you might do all the things I suggest, and she will still turn out to be different from what you hoped, because sometimes life just does its thing. What matters is that you try.

From the best-selling author of Americanah and We Should All Be Feminists comes a powerful new statement about feminism today - written as a letter to a friend.

In We Should All be Feminists, her eloquently argued and much admired essay of 2014, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie proposed that if we want a fairer world we need to raise our sons and daughters differently. Here, in this remarkable new book, Adichie replies by letter to a friend's request for help on how to bring up her new-born baby girl as a feminist.

With its fifteen pieces of practical advice Dear Ijeawele goes right to the heart of sexual politics in the twenty-first century, a reclamation of feminism in straightforward terms, a proclamation that women and girls be allowed to be their “full self”.

Speaking in a recent interview for The Guardian, Adichie commented: ‘This idea of feminism as a party to which only a select few people get to come: this is why so many women, particularly women of colour, feel alienated from mainstream western academic feminism. Because, don’t we want it to be mainstream? For me, feminism is a movement for which the end goal is to make itself no longer needed.’

Born in Nigeria, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie shot to fame with her first novel Purple Hibiscus, described in the Telegraph as ‘a beautifully judged account of the private intimate stirrings of a young girl faced with the familiar public obscenities of tyrannical power’. She has since followed this impressive debut up with a bestselling novel of lives framed against the backdrop of the Biafran War, Half of a Yellow Sun (which won the Orange Prize for Fiction and the Bailey’s Prize), a collection of stories, That Thing Around Your Neck and Americanah, a transnational fable about culture-clashes in post-9/11 USA called ‘wise, entertaining and unendingly perceptive’ by The Independent. Her 2012 TEDx talk, We Should All Be Feminists which she subsequently published as a 50-page essay has been viewed more than 3 million times.