THE THING AROUND YOUR NECK. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. Knopf. 218 pages. $24.95.

Packing a full world into a few paragraphs is precisely the short storyteller's challenge, the task Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has set for herself in the stories in The Thing Around Your Neck. The young Nigerian writer proves herself worthy of the challenge, building a rich, Nigeria-centric universe in broad and subtle strokes.

Some of the stories are set in Nigeria, some in the United States. Through the eyes of Nigerians, America is a strange place: rich people are thin, and poor people are fat. Mall food courts offer a surfeit of food and an absence of dignity, and the same items cost one price one day and half that the next.

Nigerian ways come under scrutiny as well. Adichie writes about those too eager to change their names and customs in order to assimilate, about lonely wives in arranged marriages who have been promised a better life on U.S. soil.

In some of the stories, location is a minor player, backdrop to a young girl's lethal jealousy of her older brother or a baby-sitter's attraction to the woman of the house.

Almost all the stories in the collection have been published elsewhere; certainly, they're strong enough to stand alone. But the cumulative effect for an American reading them -- an American with a BBC knowledge of Nigeria -- is a history lesson injected with emotional immediacy. Adichie examines lives interrupted by the onset of civil war in the late 1960s. She dramatizes the anxiety of Nigerians everywhere while they waited to hear if their loved ones were on the plane that crashed after takeoff from Lagos in 2004 and killed everyone on board.

The strongest story is The American Embassy, a haunting tale that spins from a violent act and a mother who must decide if she is willing to trade personal tragedy for a visa to safety.

Adichie's final story, The Headstrong Historian, is well-placed. It offers a reckoning of Nigerian history in the character of Afamefuna, whose understanding of her grandmother's life provides insight into her own education and upbringing away from the tribe. Afamefuna is able ``to make a clear link between education and dignity, between the hard, obvious things that are printed in books and the soft, subtle things that lodge themselves into the soul.''

Maggie Galehouse reviewed this book for The Houston Chronicle.

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