Set against the brutal backdrop of the Nigerian Civil War, Adichie’s soaring epic entwines three deftly drawn characters in a web of faded colonialism, racial antagonism and vexed romance.
Winner of the Women’s Prize for Fiction Winner of Winners 2020
Ugwu, a boy from a poor village, works as a houseboy for a university professor. Olanna, a young woman, has abandoned her life of privilege in Lagos to live with her charismatic new lover, the professor. And Richard, a shy English writer, is in thrall to Olanna's enigmatic twin sister. As the horrific Biafran War engulfs them, they are thrown together and pulled apart in ways they had never imagined.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's masterpiece, winner of the Orange Prize for Fiction, is a novel about Africa in a wider sense: about the end of colonialism, ethnic allegiances, class and race - and about the ways in which love can complicate all of these things.
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
ISBN: 9780007200283
Number of pages: 448
Weight: 310 g
Dimensions: 198 x 129 x 28 mm
‘Heartbreaking, funny, exquisitely written and, without doubt, a literary masterpiece and a classic’ Daily Mail ‘Stunning. This novel is an immense achievement’ Observer ‘A landmark novel. Adichie brings to history a lucid intelligence and compassion, and a heartfelt plea for memory’ Guardian 'Vividly written, thrumming with life … a remarkable novel. In its compassionate intelligence as in its capacity for intimate portraiture, this novel is a worthy successor to such twentieth-century classics as Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart and V. S. Naipaul's A Bend in the River' Joyce Carol Oates 'Here is a new writer endowed with the gift of ancient storytellers’ Chinua Achebe ‘The character burrow into your marrow and mind, and you come to care for them deeply – something that is all too rare’ Daily Telegraph ‘A sane and compassionate new voice in an often strident world’ Financial Times ‘Adichie uses language with relish. She infuses her English with a robust poetry’ Helen Dunmore, The Times ‘A powerful account of the Biafran War, horrific and tender in equal measure’ Sunday Telegraph 'Absolutely awesome. One of the best books I've ever read' Judy Finnigan ‘I wasted the last fifty pages, reading them far too greedily and fast, because I couldn’t bear to let go … magnificent’ Margaret Forster
I only read this due to the fact it was given to me through World Book Day, but I am glad that I made the effort to finish it. The tale of the uprising that lead to Biafra is told in, at times, fairly grim dialogue as... More
A fantastic book about war in Nigeria, a subject I knew very little about. This book had me close to tears at several points and made me smile in others. Took a while for me to read as it was so dramatic and there was... More
captivating
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