| Half of a Yellow Sun |  | Author: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Publisher: Anchor
Category: Book
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Rating:  87 reviews
Sales Rank: 2,377
Media: Paperback
Pages: 560
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.9
Dimensions (in): 7.9 x 5.2 x 1.1
ISBN: 1400095204
Dewey Decimal Number: 823.92
EAN: 9781400095209
ASIN: 1400095204
Publication Date: September 4, 2007
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Product Description
With effortless grace, celebrated author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie illuminates a seminal moment in modern African history: Biafra's impassioned struggle to establish an independent republic in southeastern Nigeria during the late 1960s. We experience this tumultuous decade alongside five unforgettable characters: Ugwu, a thirteen-year-old houseboy who works for Odenigbo, a university professor full of revolutionary zeal; Olanna, the professor’s beautiful young mistress who has abandoned her life in Lagos for a dusty town and her lover’s charm; and Richard, a shy young Englishman infatuated with Olanna’s willful twin sister Kainene. Half of a Yellow Sun is a tremendously evocative novel of the promise, hope, and disappointment of the Biafran war.
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Showing reviews 1-5 of 87
 Compelling and Honest February 17, 2007
Pattee Fletcher (Maryland)
72 out of 75 found this review helpful
I could not put this book down! The story grabbed hold of me immediately and soon I was living in the lives of the main characters. There are many ways to look at this book: it is a love story; a history; about African culture; about starvation; a war story; a book about families and loyalty; it is about facing fatal horror and trying to find meaning; it is literature; and it is a keeper.
The plot cannot be condensed into one theme or story. It is about loving someone with whom you have real and painful differences, the heartache, companionship, and ultimately, acceptance of each other and of the love that you have. It is about how disparate members of a family cope with plenty and with poverty. It takes you into the war for Biafra and the details are harsh, stark, and they make you pause.
Adichie presents us with an honest story; there are no happy endings; many compromises. This is the beauty of the story - it is honest, real, lyrically relentless in depicting a point in time that was a shame of a nation; of a world.
Adichie's novel will haunt you and it will stand the test of time.
But it is luminous like a full moon October 1, 2006
Yesh Prabhu, author of The Beech Tree (Plainsboro, New Jersey)
26 out of 26 found this review helpful
Every novelist has a unique story simmering in her (his) head, a story that she feels she must write; Arundhati Roy had "The God of Small Things", V. S. Naipaul had "A House for Mr. Biswas", and Chimamanda Adichie had "Half of a Yellow Sun". "This is a book I had to write," Ms. Adichie has said. "I have been thinking about this book my whole life."
When a writer thinks of a story for years, and then sets out to write it with care and passion, the prose flows as heartfelt, and the novel shines. As a result, long after you finish reading this novel, you will feel your mind lit with the light of this powerful, frightening and also deeply moving novel. Written in simple but elegant prose, her style reminded me of the great Indian writer R. K. Narayan: "He looked up at the ceiling, so high up, so piercingly white. He closed his eyes and tried to reimagine this spacious room with the alien furniture, but he couldn't. He opened his eyes, overcome by a new wonder, and looked around to make sure it was all real. To think that he would sit on these sofas, polish this slippery-smooth floor, wash these gauzy curtains."
And like R. K. Narayan, who was well-known for his short stories, Chimamanda also has written short stories as well. (She has been compared with Chinua Achebe, but I haven't read any of Achebe's novels.)
In Nigeria, in the late 1960s, there was a civil war between the Muslims in the north and Christians in the south, in the state of Biafra. Ethnic cleansing and massacre of Biafrans followed. As a result, Biafrans tried to secede from Nigeria. The half of a yellow sun refers to the emblem of the flag of the state of Biafra. Using this war as the background, the author has written a story involving five central characters: Ugwu, aged 13, who arrives at professor Odenigbo's house to work as a houseboy, and Olanna, a beautiful young woman who chooses to become Odenigbo's mistress, and Olanna's not so lovely twin sister Kainene, who is in love with Richard, an Englishman. Because other reviewers have narrated the story in brief, I do not feel the need to narrate it again.
There are beautiful, subtly erotic passages, as well as graphic passages depicting sex and violence and blood-curdling brutality. I have no doubt that similar incidents, as depicted here, did indeed occur in Biafra. But you need to have an iron stomach to be able to read these passages without feeling sick and fearful.
I wish to conclude on a cheerful note however, because I really admired this novel, and so here is a passage I wish to quote. Even though it is slightly erotic, I found it quite lovely: "But he liked going on errands to her house. They were opportunities to find her bent over, fanning the firewood or chopping ugu leaves for her mother's soup pot, or just sitting outside looking after her younger siblings, her wrapper hanging low enough for him to see the tops of her breasts."
This is truly a memorable novel; but it's not for the weak-hearted. It's even more impressive and more accomplished than her critically acclaimed first novel, Purple Hibiscus. "Half of a Yellow Sun" is an apt title, perhaps; but the novel is luminous like a full moon.
 Adichie's Half of a Yellow Sun November 28, 2006
Amanta Usukpam Ukpaghiri (San Francisco, California, U.S.A.)
35 out of 40 found this review helpful
Adichie's Half of a Yellow Sun
By Amanta Usukpam Ukpaghiri
I finished reading Half of a Yellow Sun and was left with a lingering sense of sadness at having completed the novel too quickly. I wished it continued and that l continued to read it, perhaps, for a very long time. It is a masterpiece of a work, destined to be a classic; Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has trod where many others have feared to tread. She has taken the pain and suffering and horror of a people - the Igbos -- and given them novelistic prominence, and by so doing, asked historical questions that still demand answers. She, in effect, stands athwart the current amnesia in Nigeria and requests that the country comes to terms with the Igbo sub-nationality and either accept it as a full member of the polity -- or leave it alone to its own devices. Admirably, she is (as she said in an interview) "insistently and consciously" Igbo - and unlike several economic climbers in today's Nigeria, is never shamelessly apologetic that she is Igbo.
This book is truly more than a novel - although even as a novel, it is extremely well crafted, brimming with characters that come alive and leap off the pages and embody events that unquestionably took place in the history of Nigeria. Indeed, this book is a form of historical narrative that tells the story of Igbos' vibrant engagement with Nigeria in the 1960s before the civil war, the massacres of tens of thousands of Igbos following military intervention in politics, and the period of the civil war itself from 1967 to 1970.
Chimamanda has achieved several noble things with one stroke. She has furnished literature with simple, elegant and sharp sentences and a (albeit horror) story beautifully woven together in paragraph after paragraph. She has also written a history of the Igbos during a certain period of time. Finally she has presented a literary monument to love and relationships and hope and human dignity. Her characters - - their lives, their triumphs, and their failures - speak to the enduringness of love and truth and the dominance of the human spirit.
It is simply amazing that Chimamanda is only 28 years' old -- she was born 7 years after the war ended. Yet she tells her story with a level of insight, maturity, compassion, knowledge and deftness that belies her age. It is abundantly clear that her writing is the product of tremendous research on her part of the events that led up to and including the civil war. This is fiction based on facts - or "faction."
Chimamanda's characters are seen in every day life in Nigeria. Ugwu exists in several houseboys in Nigeria with ambition and intelligence who continue to rise by dint of application of their brains and hard work and focus to attainment of lives of accomplishment. Ugwu's sense of ownership of his Master, Madam and Baby is quite widespread among faithful houseboys. Odenigbo - the professor of mathematics at University of Nigeria, Nsukka -- is the quintessential intellectual, perhaps, with his head caught up in the clouds with numerous ideological constructs and deconstructs. Kainene and Olanna are extremely human characters whose sisterly relationship with each other ironically blossomed in the midst of the war - and became warmer as they came to experience the horrors of the civil war together. Richard comes across as familiarly tragic - wanting to belong to and in Biafra and never belonging or never accepted as belonging.
Which brings us to the concept of belonging. It is a concept that Chimamanda explores in her novel. Miss Adebayo was never seen as belonging; and of course, neither was Richard. Indeed, the Igbos who had lived in the Northern part of Nigeria for several decades were never seen as belonging. Nor were the Igbos who had lived in Lagos: Chinua Achebe escaped death in Lagos during the massacre of Igbos by a hairsbreadth. The parallels between Igbos and the Jews are really striking. Belonging is a potent concept; witness the current acrimonious debate raging in the industrialized countries over immigration, which is inextricably linked to who belongs and who does not.
This is a story that has universal applications even as it is largely set in Igbo land. It tells the story of political conflict and war and love and hate and betrayal and oppression and human affirmation that is contemporary and resonates with the human condition.
It will be eminently interesting to see how this "transcendent novel" in the words of Publishers Weekly - which has been received with great literary acclaim in the United States and Europe - will be received in Nigeria. It is safe to predict that it will be seen in certain quarters through dogmatic lenses that will uncritically seek to brazenly question the novel's premises. But this will be largely besides the point - because Chimamanda has rendered a classic and has told a story about a historical necessity - the defense of and by a people from being wiped out from the face of the map.
Just a few quibbles. It was 20 and not 50 pounds that was vengefully decreed by the Government of Nigeria as the amount to be (and which was) given in exchange for all the money held by each former Biafran. Before the war, Cross River Igbos would have been referred to as Bende people and not Imo people. And the settlement in Port-Harcourt would have been called Umuokirisi and not Rumuokirisi - that came after the war. But these are mere quibbles and do not affect the historical accuracy of the novel regarding the lives and times of the Igbos before and during the civil war.
Chimamanda has rightly been described as the 21st-century successor to Chinua Achebe, and she indeed displays the same sophisticated simplicity in her writing and similar deep historical insights laced with philosophical wisdom. Indeed, Achebe describes her as being "endowed with the gift of ancient storytellers" and asserts that she "came almost fully made." The serious bent of her writings is to be widely applauded. There surely is a literary ferment afoot among young Nigerian writers in the diaspora. And Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is at the crest of that ferment. To end with Achebe's words: In writing Half of a Yellow Sun, "Adichie knows what is at stake and what to do about it."
 Something of a disappointment - Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimanada Ngozi Adichie August 27, 2007
Philip Spires (La Nucia, Spain)
15 out of 17 found this review helpful
It is not often that a novel comes to hand that has been prized, praised and pre-inflated. Half of a Yellow Sun was in that category when I opened it and began to read. And I was captivated immediately. I read the first hundred pages at a pace, delighting in the ease with which the Chimanada Ngozi Adichie used language to draw me into the middle-class clique centred on the University of Nsukka which provides the core characters of her book. Their infidelities, their inconsistencies, their desire, despite the servants, for equality and freedom are symptomatic of their time. The dissimilar twin sisters, Olanna and Kainene, one imagines will provide a vehicle for parallel and different lives, providing contrast and metaphor, and I eagerly awaited their stories to unfold.
The book's sections alternate between the early and late 1960s, the latter period in Nigeria, of course, being the Biafran War. And, yes, the characters live through the war, and their lives and their natures, and along with them their country, are transformed by it. Perhaps even their own identity is redrawn, especially once the promise of a recognised nationality is promised and then denied. Eventually there are vivid scenes of the war's brutality, its double standards, its compromises, its cynicism, its racism and its starvation. The images are graphic and vivid, unforgettable even, and the ability of war to undermine utterly and profoundly any assumption that an individual might harbour about an imagined future is movingly portrayed.
So why then was I so disappointed with the book? All I can offer, I'm afraid, is that eventually I found it shallow. Its apparent concentration on the domestic lives of the characters undermined their credibility as members of an intellectual elite and rendered them two (or perhaps even one) dimensional. Chimanada Ngozi Adichie carefully tells us that Odenigbo is a mathematician and in love with his subject. He covets his personal library, which he loses in the war and then has replaced by a benefactor. But in my experience, mathematicians are passionate people - and are usually passionate about mathematics. No mathematician I have ever met avoids all mention of personal academic interests in social settings as scrupulously as Odenigbo. I didn't want the novel to become a textbook, but if characters were ballet dancers, surely we would expect to hear of the roles they had danced and the music that had moved them. Of Odenigbo's academic character we hear nothing. Why is he therefore endowed with knowledge and interest that is never explored? Perhaps he only exists as a character to interact with the twin sisters.
And the problem is repeated with Richard Churchill who, we are told is an Igbo-speaking English radical. I knew a lot of sixties radicals and they were never slow to offer an opinion or, indeed, place themselves squarely in a space on the ideological chessboard. In Half of a Yellow Sun, we never learn if Richard is a Marxist, Maoist, Leninist or Trot. He never mentions Castro or Ho Chi Minh. He doesn't appear to have any position on capitalism, society, business, the Third World, South Africa, Central America or even Viet Nam. I found myself wondering which sixties decade saw his radicalisation. When Chimanada Ngozi Adichie tells us that he travels to Lagos to attend a function in honour of the state funeral of Winston Churchill (perhaps no relation), I began to wonder if he was an early- (or indeed late) born radical Tory. I have been an expatriate myself, so I can forgive him his attendance of the function, but not his total silence on the issues of the day.
This becomes especially problematic when both Britain and the Soviet Union are mentioned as assisting the Federal Forces in the destruction of secessionist Biafra. What sixties radical, given the inevitability of his assumption of a Cold War bifurcated paradigm to underpin his ideological position, would not have pondered and discussed this at length, even in bed?
Eventually we also have to read along with continued adulation of Ojukwu. His Excellency might even be the Great Helmsman, himself, given that his free-thinking minions seem unable to mention a criticism of an historical character who eventually fled to Ivory Coast to save his skin and live his life in relative comfort after leaving millions of his own people dead. Perhaps he had to be preserved to fight another day, as he eventually did, if in a different way, but surely no sixties radical would have left his role unquestioned. It doesn't ring true, and an opportunity to develop a character like Richard through his own and inevitable disillusion was ignored.
And then we are presented with a pair of American journalists that the radical Richard has to greet and service in his role as a promoter of the Biafran cause. They are both called Charles and apparently have the same nickname, Chuck - which surely should have been Charlie of the "right" variety to enhance the farce. They are simply not credible. We can probably accept as deadly accurate that the majority of Americans neither knew where Biafra was nor cared a jot about its plight, since the attentions of the politicised were focused elsewhere at the time. But the presentation of a pair of foreign correspondents as crass as these is surely incredible, as is, equally, Richard's apparent patience in dealing with them.
I did also become mildly annoyed at what became quite extensive use of Igbo words when they seemed to offer no extra flavour, meaning or understanding. I have no problem with the use of local terms to enhance a feeling of place and sound, but their over use tends to obfuscate. We really wanted to know what these people thought, but we were never told.
So what are we left with? Half of a Yellow Sun is a beautifully written, beautifully composed domestic tale of fidelity, infidelity, loyalty and opportunism. The contrast between the characters' and therefore the nation's lives at the start and the end of the decade is engaging. But because their psyches are never really explored, we never understand any motives or, therefore, any consequences. Reading Half of a Yellow Sun was a thoroughly enjoyable experience which, with hindsight, I would have foregone.
Viva Biafra! February 7, 2007
A.S.I (Maryland, USA & Lagos, Nigeria)
8 out of 8 found this review helpful
Ms. Adichie takes on a world she didnt experience directly, events that are bigger than her and yet she somehow succeeds at mastering them and taming them with mere written words and I owe her a debt of gratitude.
It is an epic fictional tale of events that took place amidst the real Nigerian Civil War (1967-1970). Like Chimamanda, I am Nigerian, I am Igbo, I should be Biafran. Biafra is a never talked about portion of Nigerian history. It is like a bad word, an open festering sore, unspoken about in mainstream Nigerian politics and history. Shame. I myself knew little of it despite having a father who fought in the war and a mother who survived it. Chimamanda who is my contemporary brought it to life for me.
The book follows the lives of several characters, their relationships to one another, and their lives before, during and after the war.
It also tell us the background of the War; it's colonial and ethnic beginnings.
I imagine that the writer must have been overwhelmed at times while writing this book. It must have taken a lot of courage to write about something so painful and so personal but I fancifully or truthfully think that like Frodo's Ring, it was her burden to bear and mine as a reader to share. I'm a lesser form of Sam Gamgee.
I also really love the names of some of her characters. It reminds me of the beauty of the variety of the Igbo. Iam Igbo and yet have never heard of those names. They must have been specific to the writer's state of origin/dialect.
A magnificent book and yet I only give it 4 stars out of 5. Why?
Because at times, some things and characters just stick out of place like a compound fracture, throwing the story slightly off course and giving it a vague air of contrivance. Or maybe, it is the reflection of wartime. Things dont always make sense. I'm not going to give examples as it is my own opinion which you may not share and I wont give away any spoilers.
Also, I am fiercely loyal to Kambili of 'Purple Hibiscus'. That book just means so much to me because in many many ways, I am Kambili.
All I can say is that the writer displays her impressive versatility because this book is nothing like her debut novel. Also, she tackles the psychological aspects of her story quite admirably.
I like the ending. It is not false and I like the open endedness that is sad but true, reminiscent of her previous novel. It couldnt have ended any other way.
You will not soon forget the major chracters (Olanna, Ugwu, Odenigbo, Baby) and some minor ones (Nnesinachi, Anulika, Mrs Mokelu). Adichie is a wonderful storyteller and I will always read her stuff.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 87
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