Featured on The Book Show on Sky Arts on 23 October 2008.
Shortlisted for Author of the Year at the Galaxy British Book Awards 2008.
Winner of the Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction 2007. Reviewed on Richard & Judy on Wednesday 14 March 2007. Nigeria in
the 1960s and the birth of Biafra, a time of massacre, bloody conflict
and the end of colonialism. We experience this strife through the
household of a university lecturer, his houseboy, his lover and a white
man seeking something we are never sure of. It is a tale of class more
than race, of tribal differences and of the horrors of the period. It
is immensely impressive, a big novel in every sense. Highly
recommended. Click here to view a short film about this book.
Comparison: Tash Aw, Amitav Ghosh, Geoff Ryman.
This Is Where We Live from 4th Estate on Vimeo.
| Primary Genre | Modern and Contemporary Fiction |
Win a Copy of The Sisters of Hope Square by Faith Hogan and a Bucket List Scratch Book
Closing date: 04/07/2026
Half of a Yellow Sun is one of five classic Fourth Estate books to be released as numbered, collectable editions to mark the 25th anniversary. The books will be beautifully produced hardbacks, limited to 2000 copies each, with jackets designed by some of the finest artists at work today.
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.
Half of a Yellow Sun - Fourth Estate 25th anniversary edition features in the following genres: Modern and Contemporary Fiction, General Fiction, Fiction
Half of a Yellow Sun - Fourth Estate 25th anniversary edition is available in Hardback
Half of a Yellow Sun - Fourth Estate 25th anniversary edition was written by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and published by Harpercollins Publishers
