Half of a Yellow Sun
Author(s): Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Half of a Yellow Sun is set in Nigeria in 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 second is a young middle-class woman, Olanna, who has to confront the reality of the massacre of her relatives. And the other 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 and tribal allegiances, about class and race; and the ways in which love can complicate all of these things.
Product Information
Winner of Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction 2007. Shortlisted for British Book Awards: Best Read of the Year 2007 and James Tait Black Memorial Prize (Fiction) 2007 and Independent Booksellers' Book of the Year Award: Adults' Book of the Year 2007 and Orange Youth Panel Prize 2010.
Praise for 'Purple Hibiscus': 'Immensely powerful.' Times 'An intoxicating story that is at once distinctly feminine, African and universal.' Observer '"Purple Hibiscus" is a beautifully judged account of the private intimate stirrings of a young girl faced with the familiar public obscenities of tyrannical power, and Adichie is a fresh new voice out of Africa.' Daily Telegraph 'A sensitive and touching story of a child exposed too early to religious intolerance and the uglier side of the Nigerian state.' J. M. Coetzee, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature 'This is the best new novel to have come out of Africa in some years. Like its young protagonist, it is a work of undemonstrative but rare feeling and intelligence; and it gives us one of the most fascinating and perturbing patriarchs of recent literature. But its special magic lies in conveying that, however devastated a childhood might be, it still has an unrepeatable, dream-like quality.' Amit Chaudhuri '"Purple Hibiscus" is the best debut I've read since Arundhati Roy's "The God of Small Things".' Jason Cowley, Times journalist, literary editor of the New Statesman
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, who grew up in Nigeria, was shortlisted for the 2002 Caine Prize for African Writing. Her work has been selected by the Commonwealth Broadcasting Association and the BBC Short Story Awards and has appeared in various literary publications, including 'Zoetrope 'and 'The Iowa Review'. She is the recipient of the David TK Wong Short Story Award, judged by Michele Roberts, J.M Coetzee and William Trevor. 'Purple Hibiscus' was shortlisted from the Orange Prize and Longlisted for the Man Booker Prize.
General Fields
- :
- : HarperCollins Publishers Limited
- : Harper Element
- : 01 October 2006
- : 234mm X 153mm
- : United Kingdom
- : 01 January 2020
- : books
Special Fields
- : Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
- : Paperback
- : Export ed
- : 823.92
- : 448