Half Of A Yellow Sun

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Winner of the Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction 2007.
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Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie was born in Nigeria in 1977. She is from Abba in Anambra State, but grew up in the university town of Nsukka. After the success of her first novel Purple Hibiscus which was short-listed for the Orange Prize For Fiction, this novel was highly anticipated.

Set in Nigeria during the 1960s, at the time of a vicious civil war in which a million people died and thousands were massacred in cold blood. The three main characters in the novel are swept up in the violence during these turbulent years. One is a young boy from a poor village who is employed at a university lecturer's house. The other is a young middle-class woman, Olanna, who has to confront the reality of the massacre of her relatives. And the third is a white man, a writer who lives in Nigeria for no clear reason, and who falls in love with Olanna's twin sister, a remote and enigmatic character.

As these people's lives intersect, they have to question their own responses to the unfolding political events. This extraordinary novel is about Africa in a wider sense: about moral responsibility, about the end of colonialism, about ethnic allegiances, about class and race; and about the ways in which love can complicate all of these things.