Half Of A Yellow Sun pb

With her awardwinning 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 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. Fifteenyearold 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.