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.
The film version of Half of a Yellow Sun is released in UK cinemas on Friday 11 April 2014. Click below to view the trailer.
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| Primary Genre | Modern and Contemporary Fiction |
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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.
Shortlisted for the Best of the Orange Best 2010 by the Orange Prize Youth Panel.
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.
Half of a Yellow Sun features in the following genres: Modern and Contemporary Fiction, eBooks of the Month, Sharing Diverse Voices, Family Drama, General Fiction, Fiction, Recommendations
Half of a Yellow Sun is available in Hardback, Paperback, Ebook, Book
Half of a Yellow Sun was written by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and published by Fourth Estate Ltd an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers