Product Description

A masterly, haunting new novel from a writer heralded by The Washington Post Book World as “the 21st-century daughter of Chinua Achebe,” Half of a Yellow Sun re-creates a seminal moment in modern African history: Biafra’s impassioned struggle to establish an independent republic in Nigeria in the 1960s, and the chilling violence that followed.

            With astonishing empathy and the effortless grace of a natural storyteller, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie weaves together the lives of three characters swept up in the turbulence of the decade. Thirteen-year-old Ugwu is employed as a houseboy for a university professor full of revolutionary zeal. Olanna is the professor’s beautiful mistress, who has abandoned her life of privilege in Lagos for a dusty university town and the charisma of her new lover. And Richard is a shy young Englishman in thrall to Olanna’s twin sister, an enigmatic figure who refuses to belong to anyone. As Nigerian troops advance and the three must run for their lives, their ideals are severely tested, as are their loyalties to one another.           

           Epic, ambitious, and triumphantly realized, Half of a Yellow Sun is a remarkable novel about moral responsibility, about the end of colonialism, about ethnic allegiances, about class and race—and the ways in which love can complicate them all. Adichie brilliantly evokes the promise and the devastating disappointments that marked this time and place, bringing us one of the most powerful, dramatic, and intensely emotional pictures of modern Africa that we have ever had.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #122465 in Books
• Published on: 2006-09-12
• Released on: 2006-09-12
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 448 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. When the Igbo people of eastern Nigeria seceded in 1967 to form the independent nation of Biafra, a bloody, crippling three-year civil war followed. That period in African history is captured with haunting intimacy in this artful page-turner from Nigerian novelist Adichie (Purple Hibiscus). Adichie tells her profoundly gripping story primarily through the eyes and lives of Ugwu, a 13-year-old peasant houseboy who survives conscription into the raggedy Biafran army, and twin sisters Olanna and Kainene, who are from a wealthy and well-connected family. Tumultuous politics power the plot, and several sections are harrowing, particularly passages depicting the savage butchering of Olanna and Kainene's relatives. But this dramatic, intelligent epic has its lush and sultry side as well: rebellious Olanna is the mistress of Odenigbo, a university professor brimming with anticolonial zeal; business-minded Kainene takes as her lover fair-haired, blue-eyed Richard, a British expatriate come to Nigeria to write a book about Igbo-Ukwu art—and whose relationship with Kainene nearly ruptures when he spends one drunken night with Olanna. This is a transcendent novel of many descriptive triumphs, most notably its depiction of the impact of war's brutalities on peasants and intellectuals alike. It's a searing history lesson in fictional form, intensely evocative and immensely absorbing. (Sept. 15)
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From The New Yorker
Based loosely on political events in nineteen-sixties Nigeria, this novel focusses on two wealthy Igbo sisters, Olanna and Kainene, who drift apart as the newly independent nation struggles to remain unified. Olanna falls for an imperious academic whose political convictions mask his personal weaknesses; meanwhile, Kainene becomes involved with a shy, studious British expat. After a series of massacres targeting the Igbo people, the carefully genteel world of the two couples disintegrates. Adichie indicts the outside world for its indifference and probes the arrogance and ignorance that perpetuated the conflict. Yet this is no polemic. The characters and landscape are vividly painted, and details are often used to heartbreaking effect: soldiers, waiting to be armed, clutch sticks carved into the shape of rifles; an Igbo mother, in flight from a massacre, carries her daughter's severed head, the hair lovingly braided.
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From Bookmarks Magazine
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, author of Purple Hibiscus (2003), was born in Nigeria in 1977 into a well-educated Igbo family. Drawing on her family's experience and Nigeria's history a decade before her birth, Adichie has written an ambitious, astonishing novel that succeeds on all levels. In her exploration of ethnic, religious, and class prejudices and genocide, Adichie focuses on the personal experiences of a few memorable individuals experiencing the drama of the conflict and the new nation. Her manipulation of point of view and time, from the years before and during the war, adds depth and perspective to her timely novel as secessionist tensions in the former Biafra persist.

Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.

Customer Reviews

Outstanding book
The book begins with a beautiful capture of a Nigeria at peace facing a post colonial future. Adichie attends to her characters as they slowly enter the drama of the war for Biafra. The reader feels the dread ahead of the characters--and is with them as the horrors of war accumulate in weighty but unpredictable detail.
Character development, clarity of language and overall pace are outstanding.
Half of a Yellow Sun can be painful to read but this is a superior Novel
--based on this book alone, Adichie is one of our finest writers.

Excellent, Excellent!
This was a wonderful novel with a lot to offer. Although set during wartime, you were immersed in the day-to-day lives of characters who continued to create a "normal" life in the most difficult situations. This story was heroic and full of spirit.

Absolutely stupendous!
I cannot recommend this book highly enough. It is utterly engaging, just enthralling, and beautifully written.