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Knopf
September 2006
On Sale: September 12, 2006
448 pages ISBN: 1400044162 EAN: 9781400044160 Hardcover
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Fiction
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
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