Published: 15/01/2007

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. Conjuring a richly evocative image of a complex, violent West Africa, Half of a Yellow Sun is a magnificently accomplished and emotionally engaging novel.
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
MEDIA REVIEWS
'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
'I look with awe and envy at this young woman from Africa who is recording the history of her country. She is fortunate - and we, her readers, are even luckier.' Edmund White
'Absolutely awesome. One of the best books I've ever read.' Judy Finnigan
'[Deserves] a place alongside such works as Pat Barker's "Regeneration" trilogy and Helen Dunmore's depiction of the Leningrad blockade, "The Siege".' Guardian
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“Superb”
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
“Half of a Yellow Sun”
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
“Half of a Yellow Sun”
captivating
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