Purchase
Knopf
September 2006
On Sale: September 12, 2006
448 pages
ISBN: 1400044162
EAN: 9781400044160
Hardcover
Add to Wish List
Fiction
A masterly, haunting new novel from a writer heralded by The Washington Post Book World as βthe 21st-century daughter of Chinua Achebe,β Half of a Yellow Sun re-creates a seminal moment in modern African history: Biafraβs 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 professorβs 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 Olannaβs 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 raceβand 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
 Media BuzzAll Things Considered - December 19, 2013
Studio 360 - December 20, 2008
Diane Rehm Show - NPR - October 5, 2006
All Things Considered - October 4, 2006
All Things Considered - September 17, 2006
| 
© 2003-2026