Half of a Yellow Sun: The Women’s Prize for Fiction’s ‘Winner of Winners’

Ngozi Adichie, Chimamanda

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0007200285 ISBN 13: 9780007200283

Publisher: Fourth Estate, 2017

WINNER OF THE BAILEYS PRIZE BEST OF THE BEST

Winner of the Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction 2007, this is a heartbreaking, exquisitely written literary masterpiece

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.

Review:

'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

Synopsis:

The sweeping novel from the author of 'Purple Hibiscus', shortlisted for the Orange Prize, and winner of the Commonwealth Writers Award. This highly anticipated novel from Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is set in Nigeria during the 1960s, at the time of a vicious civil war in which a million people died and thousands were massacred in cold blood. The three main characters in the novel are swept up in the violence during these turbulent years. One is a young boy from a poor village who is employed at a university lecturer's house. The other is a young middle-class woman, Olanna, who has to confront the reality of the massacre of her relatives. And the third is a white man, a writer who lives in Nigeria for no clear reason, and who falls in love with Olanna's twin sister, a remote and enigmatic character. As these people's lives intersect, they have to question their own responses to the unfolding political events. This extraordinary novel is about Africa in a wider sense: about moral responsibility, about the end of colonialism, about ethnic allegiances, about class and race; and about the ways in which love can complicate all of these things.