num_pages: 448
description: 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 Biafra’s 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. Odenigbo’s 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 father’s business; and Kainene’s 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.
language: English
title: Half of a Yellow Sun
titlecomplete: Half of a Yellow Sun
characters: Odenigbo, Olanna, Kainene, Ugwu, Richard
genres: Literary Fiction, Fiction, African Literature, Nigeria, Contemporary, Historical, War, Historical Fiction, Africa, Novels
ratings_count: 151869
places: Nigeria, Lagos, Kano, Umuahia, West Africa, Biafra, Abba, Imo, Africa, Nsukka, Port Harcourt, Orlu
awards: awardedAt: 1167638400000
name: Orange Prize
category: Fiction, awardedAt: 1136102400000
name: James Tait Black Memorial Prize
category: Fiction, awardedAt: 1167638400000
name: Anisfield-Wolf Book Award
category: Fiction, awardedAt: 1167638400000
name: PEN Open Book Award, awardedAt: 1136102400000
name: National Book Critics Circle Award
category: Fiction, awardedAt: 1167638400000
name: Hurston/Wright Legacy Award
category: Fiction
publisher: Knopf Canada