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Half of a Yellow Sun: The international bestseller and Women’s Prize for Fiction’s ‘Winner of Winners’ Paperback – 9 Mar. 2017
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THE WOMEN’S PRIZE FOR FICTION ‘WINNER OF WINNERS’
CHOSEN AS SERVICE95 BOOK CLUB'S BOOK OF THE MONTH FOR AUGUST 2023
‘A literary masterpiece’DAILY MAIL
‘An immense achievement’OBSERVER
‘A gorgeous, pitiless account of love, violence and betrayal’ TIME
In 1960s Nigeria, three lives intersect. Ugwu works as a houseboy for a university professor. Olanna has abandoned her life of privilege in Lagos to live with her charismatic lover, the lecturer. And Richard, a shy Englishman, is in thrall to Olanna’s enigmatic twin sister. Amongst the horror of Nigeria’s civil war, loyalties are tested as they are pulled apart and thrown together in ways none of them imagined.
Winner of the Women’s Prize for Fiction, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s masterpiece is a novel about race, class and the end of colonialism – and the ways in which love can complicate everything.
‘Vividly written, thrumming with life … a remarkable novel’ Joyce Carol Oates
‘Adichie entwines love and politics to a degree rarely achieved by novelists’ Elle
‘Absolutely awesome. One of the best books I’ve ever read’ Judy Finnigan
- ISBN-100007200285
- ISBN-13978-0007200283
- Edition1st
- PublisherFourth Estate
- Publication date9 Mar. 2017
- LanguageEnglish
- Dimensions12.9 x 19.8 cm
- Print length448 pages
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Review
‘Heartbreaking, funny, exquisitely written and, without doubt, a literary masterpiece and a classic’ Daily Mail
‘Stunning. This novel is an immense achievement’ Observer
‘A landmark novel. Adichie brings to history a lucid intelligence and compassion, and a heartfelt plea for memory’ Guardian
'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
'Here is a new writer endowed with the gift of ancient storytellers’ Chinua Achebe
‘The character burrow into your marrow and mind, and you come to care for them deeply – something that is all too rare’ Daily Telegraph
‘A sane and compassionate new voice in an often strident world’Financial Times
‘Adichie uses language with relish. She infuses her English with a robust poetry’ Helen Dunmore, The Times
‘A powerful account of the Biafran War, horrific and tender in equal measure’ Sunday Telegraph
'Absolutely awesome. One of the best books I've ever read' Judy Finnigan
‘I wasted the last fifty pages, reading them far too greedily and fast, because I couldn’t bear to let go … magnificent’ Margaret Forster
Book Description
The international bestseller and Women’s Prize for Fiction’s ‘Winner of Winners’
From the Back Cover
About the Author
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is the author of Purple Hibiscus, which was longlisted for the Booker Prize, Half of a Yellow Sun, which won the Orange Prize for Fiction; and acclaimed story collection The Thing Around Your Neck. Americanah, was published around the world in 2013, received numerous awards and was named one of New York Times Ten Books of the Year. A recipient of a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, she divides her time between the United States and Nigeria.
Product details
- Publisher : Fourth Estate; 1st edition (9 Mar. 2017)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 448 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0007200285
- ISBN-13 : 978-0007200283
- Dimensions : 12.9 x 19.8 cm
- Best Sellers Rank: 6,863 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- 6 in Civil War Biographies
- 187 in Women's Biographies
- 445 in Fiction Classics (Books)
- Customer reviews:
About the author
CHIMAMANDA NGOZI ADICHIE's work has appeared in numerous publications, including The New Yorker and Granta. She is the author of the novels Purple Hibiscus; Half of a Yellow Sun, which won the Orange Prize; Americanah, which won the NBCC Award and was a New York Times, Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, and Entertainment Weekly Best Book of the Year; the story collection The Thing Around Your Neck; and the essay We Should All Be Feminists. A recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, she divides her time between the United States and Nigeria.
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Twin sisters Olanna and Kainene couldn’t be more different in their approach to life after graduation: Kainene dryly amused by her work in their father’s businesses while Olanna heads off to an unfashionable university in a outlying town to be with her boyfriend Odenigbo (who Kainene dismisses as ‘the revolutionary’). Events leading up to the outbreak of war between Nigeria and Biafra conspire to drive the sisters apart and it is not immediately clear that they will be able to resolve their differences amid the chaos. The stories are also narrated in part by Richard, Kainene’s British boyfriend, who is attempting to write a novel inspired by Igbo-Ukwu art and Ugwu, Odenigbo’s houseboy, whose adolescence, education and journey to maturity are interrupted by the fighting.
This is a novel of bold ambition, not only in telling the stories of the war, but in dealing with the themes that engaged and challenged people through the 1960s. Olanna and Odenigbo are both academics, hosting colleagues and visitors at their home each night for lively, wide-ranging and drunken debates on the future of post-colonial Africa. Kainene and Olanna are both modern girls, keen to have careers and not be as dependent on their men as their mother perhaps is. Meanwhile fine distinctions abound – between wealthy Olanna (who after fleeing finds herself missing her tablecloths) and her aunt’s more down-to-earth family, the differences between the sophisticated city dwellers and the superstitions of village life, Richard’s attempts to distinguish himself from the other Westerners – which are often missed when the ill-informed speak of ‘Africa’ as one mass.
Although set on a different continent, there is a lot here to inform about current events in Europe and the Middle East. Olanna and Odenigbo's failure to get out of harm's way, not anticipating the need to leave until literally the moment that they can hear shelling. And then, a form of internal exile as they move from one place to another, trying to remain in contact with friends and family who are similarly scattered, while facing starvation and diseases as deadly as the fighting. Ambitious in scope, but that ambition is realised in this wonderful, challenging and vivid story.
This one took me nearly two months to read, largely because I found it almost completely flat in tone despite the human tragedy it describes. I learned a good deal about the background to the Biafran War, which happened when I was far too young to understand it but still registered with me and all my generation because of the horrific pictures of starving children that were shown on the news night after night for many months. I also learned a lot about the life of the privileged class in Nigeria – those with a conflicted relationship with their colonial past, adopting British education, the English language and the Christian religion while despising the colonisers who brought these things to their country. Adichie manages to be relatively even-handed – whenever she has one of her characters blame the British for all their woes, she tends to have another at least hint at the point that not all the atrocities Africans carry out against each other can be blamed on colonisation, since inter-ethnic hatreds and massacres long predated colonisation.
In this case it is the Igbo who are presented as the persecuted – the same ethnic group as Chinua Achebe writes about in Things Fall Apart, a book which I feel has clearly influenced Achebe’s style. The attempt at a degree of even-handedness struck me in both, as did the method of telling the political story through the personal lives of a small group of characters. In both, that style left me rather disappointed since I am always more interested in the larger political picture than in the domestic arena, but that’s simply a subjective preference. I felt I learned far more about how the Biafrans lived – the food they ate, the way they cooked, the superstitions of the uneducated “bush people”, the marriage customs, etc. - than I did about why there was such historical animosity between the northern Nigerians and the Igbo, which personally would have interested me more. On an intellectual level, however, I feel it’s admirable that Adichie chose not to devote her book to filling in the ignorance of Westerners, but instead assumed her readership would have enough background knowledge – like Achebe’s, this is a tale told by an African primarily for Africans, and as such I preferred it hugely to Americanah, which I felt was another in the long string of books written by African and Asian ex-pats mainly to pander to the white-guilt virtue-signalling of the Western English-speaking world.
Although I found all of the descriptions of life before and during the war interesting, the main problem of the book for me was that I didn’t care much about any of the characters. Just as I find annoying British books that concentrate on the woes of the privileged class, and especially on the hardships of writers, so I found it here too. Adichie is clearly writing about the class she inhabits – academics, politically-minded, wealthy enough to have servants – and I found her largely uncritical of her own class, and rather unintentionally demeaning towards the less privileged – the servants and the people without access to a British University education, many without even the right to basic schooling.
Adichie is far more interested in romantic relationships than I am, and the bed-hopping of her main characters occasionally gave me the feeling I had drifted into an episode of Dallas or Dynasty by mistake. I was also a little taken aback, given Adichie’s reputation as a feminist icon, that it appeared that the men’s infidelities seemed to be more easily forgiven than the women’s, even by the women. (I don’t think she’s wrong in this – it just surprised me that she somehow didn’t seem to highlight it as an issue.) But what surprised me even more, and left a distinctly unpleasant taste, was when she appeared to be trying to excuse and forgive a character who participated in a gang-rape of a young girl during the war. I think she was perhaps suggesting that war coarsens us all and makes us behave out of character, and I’m sure that’s true. But it doesn’t make it forgivable, and this feminist says that women have to stop helping men to justify or excuse rape in war. There is no justification, and I was sorry that that particular character was clearly supposed to have at least as much of my sympathy as the girl he raped.
So overall, a mixed reaction from me. I’m glad to have read it, I feel a learned a considerable amount about the culture of the privileged class of the Igbo and the short-lived Biafran nation, but I can’t in truth say I wholeheartedly enjoyed it.
Top reviews from other countries
Biafra fue el nombre que tomó la región sudoriental de Nigeria al proclamar su independencia de este país e instituirse como una república en 1967. Subsistió como Estado independiente hasta principios de 1970.
Chimamanda nos cuenta una historia, real o ficción pero que vale la pena conocer.
Buena lectura!
Reviewed in Spain on 31 December 2023
Biafra fue el nombre que tomó la región sudoriental de Nigeria al proclamar su independencia de este país e instituirse como una república en 1967. Subsistió como Estado independiente hasta principios de 1970.
Chimamanda nos cuenta una historia, real o ficción pero que vale la pena conocer.
Buena lectura!
How love, relationships between man and woman, siblings, parents and children are so universal.
How war can bring up the worst and the best in people.
If you remember Biafra this narrative will give it good context, very sad and beautiful at the same time
I couldn’t stop reading it, cry about the wasted lives and the human emergency that comes with senseless political games, still played in too many parts of the world. The author depicts the tiny details that are shuttered when wars reigns. A must read for everyone!