Praise for Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s
Half of a Yellow Sun
“At once historical and eerily current…. Like Nadine Gordimer, [Adichie] likes to position her characters at crossroads where public and private allegiances threaten to collide…. [ Half of a Yellow Sun ] speaks through history to our war-racked age.”
— The New York Times Book Review
“Destined to become a classic…. This book confirms the notion that if you want to understand a country’s soul, read its fiction.”
— Minneapolis Star Tribune
“[ Half of a Yellow Sun ] is Tolstoyan in its grasp of history and in its ability to traverse various ends of the social spectrum from a village manservant to the daughter of wealthy bureaucrats.”
— The Denver Post
“Adichie’s fully realized and finely observed characters hook the reader and carry the story through wrenching events to its sorrowful, tragic conclusion…. By venturing so fearlessly into complex moral territory, Adichie reveals her talents as a novelist as well as her gifts as a perceptive observer of human behavior.”
— Newsday
“A novel that [uses] fiction to its best advantage, telling the stories of ordinary people—loving, fallible, passionate and vulnerable—ineluctably caught in savage circumstances of chaos, breakdown and violence…. Written with unflinching clarity, what Adichie’s novel offers is a compassionate, compelling look at the nearly unfathomable immediacy of war’s effect on people.”
— Chicago Tribune
“We do not usually associate wisdom with beginners, but here is a new writer endowed with the gift of ancient storytellers…. She is fearless, or she would not have taken on the intimidating horror of Nigeria’s civil war. Adichie came almost fully made.”
—Chinua Achebe
“Adichie uses layers of history, symbol and myth … [and] uses language with relish. She infuses her English with a robust poetry, and the narrative is cross-woven with Igbo idiom and language.”
— The Times (London)
“Engrossing…. In its deeply insightful portrayal of one of Ni geria’s most traumatic epochs, Adichie’s novel affirms a differ ent kind of historical ‘truth’—not the facile truth of facts, figures, and dates—but the deeper truth of throbbing, lived experience.”
— The Nation
“Adichie is part of a new generation revisiting the history that her parents survived. She brings to it a lucid intelligence and compassion, and a heartfelt plea for memory.”
— The Guardian (London)
“A sweeping story that provides both a harrowing history lesson and an engagingly human narrative…. Adichie puts a powerfully human face on this sobering story, which is far from over.”
— The Seattle Times
“Adichie subtly nods at those responsible for the massacre without sliding into polemics. [She] refuses to turn away from the past’s ugly reality, mourning not just the lives lost but a time when ‘people believed deeply in something.’ Through her dazzling storytelling, that time will not be easily forgotten.”
— Newsweek International
“Vividly written, thrumming with life, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun is a remarkable novel. In its compassionate intelligence, as in its capacity for intimate portraiture, this novel is a worthy successor to such twentieth-century classics as Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and V. S. Naipaul’s A Bend in the River .”
—Joyce Carol Oates
“Adichie is far too young for us to declare that she’s the Tolstoy of West Africa…. But she’s as good as any of her contemporaries, who are a talented lot indeed, at keeping our interest alive in a part of the world that most of us have never visited— until now.”
— All Things Considered, NPR
“An immense achievement…. As well as freshly re-creating this nightmarish chapter in her country’s history, she writes about the slow process by which love, if strong enough, may over come.”
— The Observer (London)
“Adichie’s powerful second novel retells the shocking story of the ethnic cleansing and mass starvation in this breakaway territory of Nigeria in 1967…. Masterfully, Adichie dissects their reactions as barbarism disrupts their bourgeois comfort and their struggle for survival.”
— People
“Searing, beautifully written…. What makes [ Half of a Yellow Sun ] so deeply compelling and involving are [Adichie’s] powers of empathy and imagination. She creates memorably distinctive characters and shows how the horrors of persecution, massacre, starvation and war affect their lives.”
— San Francisco Chronicle
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Half of a Yellow Sun
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie grew up in Nigeria. Her work has been translated into thirty languages and has appeared in various publications, including The New Yorker , Granta , The O. Henry Prize Stories , The Financial Times , and Zoetrope: All-Story .
She is the author of the novels Purple Hibiscus , which won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award; Half of a Yellow Sun , which won the Orange Prize; Americanah , which won the National Book Critics Circle Award; the story collection The Thing Around Your Neck ; and the essays We Should All Be Feminists and Dear Ijeawele, or A Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions , both national bestsellers. A recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, she divides her time between the United States and Nigeria.
www.chimamanda.com