Half of a Yellow Sun

by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (Author)

• Used

  Hardcover
  2006

  $6.48

  This is the sweeping new novel from the author of Purple Hibiscus , shortlisted for the Orange Prize and winner of the Commonwealth Writers Award. 'Vividly written, thrumming with life, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Half of a Yellow Sun is a remarkable novel. In its compassionate intelligence as in its capacity for intimate portraiture, this novel is a worthy successor to such 20th-century classics as Cinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart and V.S. Naipaul's A Bend in the River .' - Joyce Carol Oates. This highly anticipated new 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 get 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 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 the ways in which love can complicate all of these things. Immensely powerful and with a sweeping pace, this novel will be one of the most talked-about books of the year.