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This is the second novel by Chimamanda Ngozi
Adichie, following
Purple Hibiscus (2002) which is also set in Nigeria.
It was published in hardcover in 2006 when the author was 29,
and won the prestigious Orange Prize in 2007. The Orange
Prize (underwritten by the telecommunications company, Orange)
is awarded to the best full length novel written in English by a
woman of any nationality.
Half of a Yellow Sun is a remarkable, totally absorbing
epic about a small corner of the vast continent of Africa that
many Westerners couldn't find on a map, but is nonetheless home
to 120 million people. It's a story of ethnic allegiances, moral
responsibility and love which puts a face on the devastating
civil war that erupted less than 40 years ago, in 1967, when the
Igbo people, responding to the mass killings of their people,
attempted to break away from Nigeria to form their own
independent nation of Biafra, triggering a three-year civil war
that left an estimated 3 million dead (see sidebar).
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.
The book title is a reference to the short-lived Biafran flag -
3 horizontal stripes, red, black and green, with a bright yellow
half sun in the center of the central black stripe, its eleven
rays representing the eleven provinces of Biafra. In 400 intense
pages Adichie takes us from the hopeful early days of the sun
rising over a new country; to the terrible, grim conclusion of
the broken and starving land three years later. It is quite
stunning.
About the Author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
(pronounced Chim-muh-MAHN-duh en-GOH-zee ah-DEECH-ee-(ay) The
ay is soft, not quite a diphthong) is currently attending
graduate school in the African Studies program at Yale and
working on her next book.
Brought up as a Roman Catholic, Adichie is from the
Biafran region of Nigeria, but was born after the civil war
ended. Her father, a professor of statistics, lost everything in
the war but eventually became vice-chancellor of the University
of Nigeria. As a child she devoured Enid Blyton books and
soon started writing her own books with middle-class white
characters "exactly like Enid Blyton's". It was only later, when
she began to read African books that she realized that black
Africans "could actually exist" in literature.
When asked what led her to write Half of a
Yellow Sun, Adichie replies:
"Because I lost both grandfathers in the Nigeria-Biafra war, because the war changed the course of Igbo history, because "Biafra" is still an incredibly potent word in Nigeria today, because many of the issues that led to the war remain unresolved, because my father has tears in his eyes when he speaks of losing his father, and my mother has never spoken at length about losing her father, because almost every Igbo person alive in the 1960s was affected by the pre-war massacres, because colonialism makes me angry, because the thought of the egos of organizations and men leading to the unnecessary deaths of children makes me angry, because I think we are in danger of forgetting."
More biographical info & an interview.
This review was originally published in The BookBrowse Review in September 2006, and has been updated for the September 2007 edition. Click here to go to this issue.
If you liked Half of a Yellow Sun, try these:
The unforgettable, haunting story of a young woman's perilous fight for freedom and justice for her brother, the first novel published in English by a female Kurdish writer.
The second volume in a magisterial trilogy, the story of Cameroon caught between empires during World War II.
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