Half of a Yellow Sun

With her award-winning debut novel, Purple Hibiscus, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie was heralded by theWashington Post Book Worldas the 21st century daughter of Chinua Achebe. Now, in her masterly, haunting new novel, she recreates a seminal moment in modern African history: Biafras impassioned struggle to establish an independent republic in Nigeria during the 1960s. With the effortless grace of a natural storyteller, Adichie weaves together the lives of five characters caught up in the extraordinary tumult of the decade. Fifteen-year-old Ugwu is houseboy to Odenigbo, a university professor who sends him to school, and in whose living room Ugwu hears voices full of revolutionary zeal. Odenigbos beautiful mistress, Olanna, a sociology teacher, is running away from her parents world of wealth and excess; Kainene, her urbane twin, is taking over their fathers business; and Kainenes English lover, Richard, forms a bridge between their two worlds. As we follow these intertwined lives through a military coup, the Biafran secession and the subsequent war, Adichie brilliantly evokes the promise, and intimately, the devastating disappointments that marked this time and place. Epic, ambitious and triumphantly realized,Half of a Yellow Sunis a more powerful, dramatic and intensely emotional picture of modern Africa than any we have had before.

Author: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Language: English

Edition: 1st

Binding: Hardcover

Pages: 448

Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf

Publication Date: 2006-09-12