Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Award-Winning Novel, "Half of a Yellow Sun"

marco carrara: The book is strong and full of energy, something seldom found in today’s literature.
It would deserve five stars if the leading characters had more depth.

Italy on Aug 22, 2023

gad: Loved the richness of the characters and the historical recap of these terrible times was very accurate. Very well written.

United States on Aug 04, 2023

Yadiri Mejia Lopez: An exhilarating story that carries you
through the lives of its characters and summerges you in the violent merciless Nigerian civil war. I recommend this book to those who want to learn more about Biafra humanitarian crisis. A crisis the world watched in silence.

Netherlands on Mar 19, 2023

Chris H: Most historians seem to enjoy dwelling on either Hitler or the Tudors so, shamefully, it’s not been unusual for substantial chapters of Britain’s postcolonial history to have been overlooked by pretty much everyone. As such, Adichie deserves a great deal of credit for this carefully crafted tale which reinforces the oft quoted axiom that those who present us with the truest insights into our lives and those of others are often novelists; she has done a great job.
Scenes such as those in which a woman on a refugee train reveals her own daughter’s severed head stowed in a calabash and in which Ugwu, the (former) servant of the central characters, loses his moral compass by participating in a gang rape emphasise the magnitude of the issues with which the book deals. Equally, much of both the language and the plotting communicate a rare combination of beauty and despair which will move any vaguely sensitive reader.
Three issues, however, have stopped me from giving the book five stars.
First, the pace and structure of the narrative are less of an aid and more of a barrier to communication. Initially, for example, Adichie spends many, many pages establishing the central...

United Kingdom on Sep 29, 2021

FictionFan: When inter-ethnic warfare in Nigeria leads to the Igbo breaking away to form their own short-lived nation of Biafra, the five main characters in the book find themselves caught up in the slaughter and mass starvation that results. Olanna and Kainene are twins, the privileged daughters of a wealthy businessman, who have both returned to Nigeria after being educated in English universities. Olanna is in love with Odenigbo, an academic with strong nationalist and revolutionary leanings. Kainene falls for Richard, a white man who is failing to write the book he came to Nigeria to research, and whose main purpose is to personify white guilt. Then there’s Ugwu, servant to Odenigbo and Olanna – his purpose appears to be to show how devoted the servant class is to the privileged who sit around pontificating while their servants do all the work of cooking, cleaning and bringing up their children for them, while having to beg for an occasional day off to visit their families.

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,...

United Kingdom on Sep 12, 2021

Ayoeridani: I have read many books in my lifetime. Some are memorable because everyone agrees that they are classics and the brouhaha that is created around them makes it hard for the reader to forget them. Others are good because they strike a chord in the reader's mind, evoke strong emotions, or reminds the reader of a lived experience. Others are light and fun, written in such a way that you can only take away a phrase or two. But some, are mirrors held up to our faces and we can't avoid the stark reality that they portray, so we begrudgingly remember them even if we don't want to. This book, "Half of a Yellow Sun" has all the components of a classic. It is a mirror held up to society to reveal the extent of hate we can dispense to each other. Though we aren't inherently evil, sometime the things people do to preserve such "social constructs" as the survival of the State, are absolutely evil. The Biafra war was such an evil unnecessary event that deeply scarred the psyche of a young nation that was emerging from yet another trauma of colonization. I will not go into the events that take place in the book because I am afraid that I will ruin it for everyone. What I will say is, there is a...

United States on Oct 12, 2020

D Putri: This book tells the harrowing story of the Nigerian civil war in the 1960s, or otherwise referred to as the Nigerian/Biafra conflict, through the eyes of a houseboy, two twin sisters, a professor and a British writer.

This war is a seminal moment in African history that dwarfs in terms of scale when compared to other wars that the continent has endured in its post-colonial era. However, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, recently hailed by Salon as one of America's most promising young writers (20 under 40), brilliantly retold history that was richly infused with color, character and emotions, taking it out of the Western stereotypes of any African conflict.

The story jumps back and forth between the period of the early sixties, which protrays Nigeria in the early days of its independence from British colonial rule, and the late sixties, during which the civil war took place. But inspite of the big socio-political backdrop, this book is more about the relationship of the different characters to each other and how that relationship is affected by the horrors of war than about history or politics.

The characters really couldn't have been more different to each other, and...

United States on Jun 30, 2011

Ralph Blumenau: We know from the blurb that this is a novel about the civil war in Nigeria; but it all begins placidly enough around 1962. Ugwu, a 13 year old boy from a poor village, is taken on as a houseboy by Odenigbo, a mathematics lecturer at the university of Nsukka, near Enugu, in the South-East of Nigeria, the area that would in 1967 be known as Biafra. (It would have been helpful if the book had included a map of Nigeria for those readers unacquainted with its regions and its geography.) He lives with the beautiful Olanna, who is back in Nigeria after having got a Masters Degree from London University, and who has moved from her home town Lagos (where the majority population was Yoruba) to Nsukka to be with him. They are all Igbos. Olanna has simple but much-loved relatives at Kano in the North, where the majority population are the Muslim Hausa. When she visits them there, "she felt that things were in order, the way they were meant to be" (p.39) Also in Nsukka, working on a book, is Richard Churchill, the shy English lover of Olanna's sister Kainene, who lives in Port Harcourt (the main port of what would become Biafra). All these characters and the relationships between them are well...

United Kingdom on Jun 30, 2007