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Half of a Yellow Sun: Summary and book reviews of Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, plus links to an excerpt from Half of a Yellow Sun and a biography of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.
Half of a Yellow Sun
by
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Hardcover: Sep 2006,
448 pages.
Paperback: Sep 2007,
528 pages.
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.
Book Reviews
BookBrowse
Adichie delivers a searing, never dry, history lesson packaged into a strong and deeply effecting, even sensuous, story seen primarily through the eyes of the wealthy and well connected twin sisters Olanna and Kainene, and the particularly compelling character of Ugwu, the 13-year-old peasant houseboy of a radical university professor.
Full Review (members only, 937 words).
Library Journal
..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.
Publishers Weekly
A transcendent novel of many descriptive triumphs... a searing history lesson in fictional form, intensely evocative and immensely absorbing.
Booklist - Donna Seaman
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.
Elle Magazine
Brilliant . . . A stunning sophomore effort ....this is what great fiction does – it simultaneously devours and ennobles, and it is freely acknowledged invention comes to be truer than the facts upon which it is built.
Times Literary Supplement (London) Half of a Yellow Sun strikes one as a fresh examination of the ravages of war [because] of Adichie’s poignant handling of human emotions, in a range of circumstances from romance to conflict.
The Observer (UK)
An immense achievement . . . as well as freshly recreating this nightmarish chapter in her country's history, she writes about the slow process by which love, if strong enough, may overcome.
The Scotsman
Absorbing . . . I couldn’t put the book down . . . [a] leap forward in the career of a very talented writer.
Binyavanga Wainaina, author of Discovering Home, founder of the journal Kwani, and winner of The Caine Prize for African Writing
Astonishing . . . fierce and beautifully written. Chimamanda continues to lead
us from the front with her powerful new book. So much of the experience of our
generation of Africans is about how we find ourselves reacting to our times
based on wars and battles and events that we know little about, but which
continue to define us. We need to take control of our history, so we can manage
our present. And it is this idea that is the inspiration behind this novel . . .
. Half of a Yellow Sun is honest and cutting, and always, always human,
always loving . . . . It is a pleasure to read Chimamanda’s crisp, resonant
prose. We see how every person's belonging is contested in a new nation; find
out that nobility of purpose has no currency in this contest; how powerfully we
can love; how easily we can kill; how human we can be when a war dedicates
itself to stripping our humanity from us. Half of a Yellow Sun is
ambitious, impeccably researched . . . Penetrating . . . epic and confident.
Adichie refuses to look away.
Chinua Achebe
We do not usually associate wisdom with beginners, but here is a new writer endowed with the gift of ancient storytellers. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie knows what is at stake, and what to do about it. Her experimentation with the dual mandate of English and Igbo in perennial discourse is a case in point. Timid and less competent writers would avoid the complication altogether, but Adichie embraces it because her story needs it. She is fearless, or she would not have taken on the intimidating horror of Nigeria's civil war. Adichie came almost fully made.
A spellbinding novel that spans the Victorian era through the World War I years, and centers around a famous children's book author and the passions, betrayals, and secrets that tear apart the people she loves.
A novel on the anxiety and disconnection of post-9/11 America, on the insidiousness of racism, the blind-sidedness of war, and the recklessness thrust on others in the name of love.
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Half of a Yellow Sun
BookBrowse
(members only, 937 words).
Library Journal
Binyavanga Wainaina, author of Discovering Home, founder of the journal Kwani, and winner of The Caine Prize for African Writing
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