

Out that nobility of purpose has no currency in this contest how powerfully weĬan love how easily we can kill how human we can be when a war dedicates We see how every person's belonging is contested in a new nation find It is a pleasure to read Chimamanda’s crisp, resonant Half of a Yellow Sun is honest and cutting, and always, always human,Īlways loving.

And it is this idea that is the inspiration behind this novel. We need to take control of our history, so we can manage Generation of Africans is about how we find ourselves reacting to our timesīased on wars and battles and events that we know little about, but whichĬontinue to define us. Us from the front with her powerful new book. Adichie brilliantly evokes the promise and the devastating disappointments that marked this time and place, bringing us one of the most powerful, dramatic, and intensely emotional pictures of modern Africa that we have ever had.Īstonishing. As Nigerian troops advance and the three must run for their lives, their ideals are severely tested, as are their loyalties to one another.Įpic, ambitious, and triumphantly realized, Half of a Yellow Sun is a remarkable novel about moral responsibility, about the end of colonialism, about ethnic allegiances, about class and raceand the ways in which love can complicate them all.

And Richard is a shy young Englishman in thrall to Olannas twin sister, an enigmatic figure who refuses to belong to anyone. Olanna is the professors beautiful mistress, who has abandoned her life of privilege in Lagos for a dusty university town and the charisma of her new lover. Thirteen-year-old Ugwu is employed as a houseboy for a university professor full of revolutionary zeal. With astonishing empathy and the effortless grace of a natural storyteller, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie weaves together the lives of three characters swept up in the turbulence of the decade. A masterly, haunting new novel from a writer heralded by The Washington Post Book World as the 21st-century daughter of Chinua Achebe, Half of a Yellow Sun re-creates a seminal moment in modern African history: Biafras impassioned struggle to establish an independent republic in Nigeria in the 1960s, and the chilling violence that followed.
