LoveReading Says
LoveReading Says
In 2015 Half of a Yellow Sun was named the Baileys' ‘Best of the Best’, chosen from the past decade's winners of the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction.
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.
The Bailey's 'Best of the Best' announcement was made on November 2nd at an event hosted by Kate Mosse OBE, novelist and co-founder of the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction, at the Piccadilly Theatre in London.
Adichie, who was not able to make the ceremony but sent a video message, said: “This is a prize I have a lot of respect and admiration for – over the years it’s brought wonderful literature to a wide readership that might not have found many of the books. I have a lot of respect for the books that have won in the past 10 years and also for the books that have been shortlisted – I feel I am in very good company. To be selected as ‘Best of the Best’ of the past decade is such an honour. I’m very grateful and very happy.”
Comparison: Tash Aw, Amitav Ghosh, Geoff Ryman.
February 2012 Guest Editor Joanna Trollope on Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie...
Here’s a real find. A gorgeous (in every sense) young writer who makes modern stories sound fresh but as if they come from ancient story tellers, at the same time – it’s something about the wonderful rhythms of her language. My favourite of hers is Half of a Yellow Sun but I loved Purple Hibiscus too. You can smell and feel Africa; you believe in these people – it’s not easy to create such a powerful reality, and she does it so well.
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Sarah Broadhurst
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Half of a Yellow Sun Synopsis
With her award-winning debut novel, Purple Hibiscus, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie was heralded by the Washington Post Book World as 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 Sun is a more powerful, dramatic and intensely emotional picture of modern Africa than any we have had before.From the Hardcover edition.
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Press Reviews
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Press Reviews
'Heartbreaking, funny, exquisitely written and, without doubt, a literary masterpiece and a classic.' Daily Mail
'Stunning. It has a ramshackle freedom and exuberant ambition.' Observer
'I look with awe and envy at this young woman from Africa who is recording the history of her country. She is fortunate – and we, her readers, are even luckier.' Edmund White
'Vividly written, thrumming with life…a remarkable novel. In its compassionate intelligence as in its capacity for intimate portraiture, this novel is a worthy successor to such twentieth-century classics as Chinua Achebe's “Things Fall Apart” and V.S. Naipaul's “A Bend in the River”.' Joyce Carol Oates
Author
About Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie was born in Nigeria in 1977. Her first novel 'Purple Hibiscus' was published in 2003 and was longlisted for the Booker Prize. Her second novel 'Half of a Yellow Sun' won the 2007 Orange Prize for Fiction. Her work has been selected by the Commonwealth Broadcasting Association and the BBC Short Story Awards, has appeared in various literary publications, including Zoetrope and The Iowa Review. She won a MacArthur 'genius' grant in 2009, and in 2010 appeared on the New Yorker's list of the best 20 writers under 40.
photograph by Marco Del Grande
Fellow novelist ANNE BERRY on CHIMAMANDA NGOZI ADICHIE
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s novelHalf of a Yellow Sun is a stunning book throughout, set in 1960’s Nigeria as it erupts into the bloody Biafran War of secession. There is so much I loved about this book, the crisp narration that never balks from taking the reader into the darkest corners of man’s nature, the relationship between the twin sisters Olanna and Kainene, the clashing of their different natures and the divergent paths they follow.
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