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Summary
Summary
NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FINALIST * From the award-winning, bestselling author of Americanah and We Should All Be Feminists --a haunting story of love and war. * Recipient of the Women's Prize for Fiction "Winner of Winners" award.
With effortless grace, celebrated author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie illuminates a seminal moment in modern African history: Biafra's impassioned struggle to establish an independent republic in southeastern Nigeria during the late 1960s. We experience this tumultuous decade alongside five unforgettable characters: Ugwu, a thirteen-year-old houseboy who works for Odenigbo, a university professor full of revolutionary zeal; Olanna, the professor's beautiful young mistress who has abandoned her life in Lagos for a dusty town and her lover's charm; and Richard, a shy young Englishman infatuated with Olanna's willful twin sister Kainene.
Half of a Yellow Sun is a tremendously evocative novel of the promise, hope, and disappointment of the Biafran war.
Author Notes
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie was born in Enugu, Nigeria on September 15, 1977. She studied medicine and pharmacy at the University of Nigeria for a year and a half before moving to the United States, where she studied communication at Drexel University for two years. She received a bachelor's degree in communication and political science at Eastern Connecticut State University in 2001, a master's degree in creative writing at Johns Hopkins University, and a master's degree in African Studies from Yale University in 2008.
Her first novel, Purple Hibiscus, was published in 2003 and received the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Best First Book in 2005. Her other books include The Thing around Your Neck, Americanah, and We Should All Be Feminist. Half of a Yellow Sun won the Orange Prize in 2007. She was awarded the 2018 PEN Pinter Prize, for her body of work that shows 'outstanding literary merit'.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (3)
Publisher's Weekly 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) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
Adichie surpasses her award-winning debut, Purple Hibiscus (2003), with a magnificent novel in which the dreams and tragedies of 1960s Nigeria are filtered through the minds and experiences of stupendously compelling characters. From page 1, an unbreakable bond is forged between the reader and Ugwu, a bright and kind young teen who has left his barebones village to serve as houseboy to Odenigbo, a robust and radical professor full of hope for newly independent Nigeria in spite of ingrained ethnic divides and colonialism's deleterious aftereffects. Ugwu becomes devoted to Odenigbo's beautiful and cultured lover, Olanna, as Odenigbo's treacherous mother plots against her, and her estranged twin sister, tough and sardonic Kainene, takes up with a gentle Englishman. The momentous psychological and ethical pressures Adichie engineers could support an engrossing novel in their own right, but her great subject is Nigeria's horrific civil war, specifically the fate of Biafra, the doomed breakaway Igbo state. Half a yellow sun is Biafra's emblem of hope, but the horrors and misery Adichie's characters endure transform the promising image of a rising sun into that of a sun setting grimly over a blood-soaked and starving land. Adichie has masterminded a commanding, sensitive epic about a vicious civil war that, for all its particular nightmares, parallels every war predicated by prejudice and stoked by outside powers hungry for oil and influence. --Donna Seaman Copyright 2006 Booklist
Library Journal Review
Nigerian-born Adichie's first novel, Purple Hibiscus, won the Commonwealth Writers' Prize and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award and was short-listed for two other prestigious awards. As one reads Adichie's lyrical descriptions, it becomes clear why she is recognized as a promising new voice in literature. However, as is sometimes the case, the second novel does not merit the same extravagant praise as the first. Set in Nigeria during the turbulent years of the 1960s, this new work follows the stories of twin sisters Olanna and Kainene, their lovers, their family, and others who inhabit their privileged worlds, soon to be transformed by civil war. From the opening page, on which Adichie describes hedges "trimmed so flat on top that they looked like tables wrapped in leaves," the reader is transported to a world so strongly imaged as to feel like a painting. But, disappointingly, the story line is not as well developed as the setting, and the characters fail to emerge fully. Not as great as the sum of its parts; for larger collections only. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 5/1/06.]-Caroline Hallsworth, City of Greater Sudbury (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.