Half of a Yellow Sun - ISBNLookup.com

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Called "the 21st-century daughter of Chinua Achebe" by The Washington Post, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie certainly lives up to the hype in her second novel, Half a Yellow Sun. She wowed us with this transcendent tale about war, loyalty, brutality, and love in modern Africa. While painting a searing portrait of the tragedy that took place in Biafra during the 1960s, her story finds its true heart in the intimacy of three ordinary lives buffeted by the winds of fate. Her tale is hauntingly evocative and impossible to forget.

Rob Nixon

Half of a Yellow Sun takes us inside ordinary lives laid waste by the all too ordinary unraveling of nation states. When an acquaintance of Olanna’s turns up at a refugee camp, she notices that -- he was thinner and lankier than she remembered and looked as though he would break in two if he sat down abruptly. -- It’s a measure of Adichie’s mastery of small things -- and of the mess the world is in - that we see that man arrive, in country after country, again and again and again.
— The New York Times

The New Yorker

Adichie indicts the outside world for its indifference and probes the arrogance and ignorance that perpetuated the conflict. Yet this no polemic. The characters and landscape are vividly painted, and details are often used to heartbreaking effect.

Publishers Weekly

When the Igbo people of eastern Nigeria seceded in 1967 to form the independent nation of Biafra, a bloody, crippling three-year civil war followed. That period in African history is captured with haunting intimacy in this artful page-turner from Nigerian novelist Adichie (Purple Hibiscus). Adichie tells her profoundly gripping story primarily through the eyes and lives of Ugwu, a 13-year-old peasant houseboy who survives conscription into the raggedy Biafran army, and twin sisters Olanna and Kainene, who are from a wealthy and well-connected family. Tumultuous politics power the plot, and several sections are harrowing, particularly passages depicting the savage butchering of Olanna and Kainene's relatives. But this dramatic, intelligent epic has its lush and sultry side as well: rebellious Olanna is the mistress of Odenigbo, a university professor brimming with anticolonial zeal; business-minded Kainene takes as her lover fair-haired, blue-eyed Richard, a British expatriate come to Nigeria to write a book about Igbo-Ukwu art-and whose relationship with Kainene nearly ruptures when he spends one drunken night with Olanna. This is a transcendent novel of many descriptive triumphs, most notably its depiction of the impact of war's brutalities on peasants and intellectuals alike. It's a searing history lesson in fictional form, intensely evocative and immensely absorbing. (Sept. 15) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

Nigerian-born Adichie's first novel, Purple Hibiscus, won the Commonwealth Writers' Prize and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award and was short-listed for two other prestigious awards. As one reads Adichie's lyrical descriptions, it becomes clear why she is recognized as a promising new voice in literature. However, as is sometimes the case, the second novel does not merit the same extravagant praise as the first. Set in Nigeria during the turbulent years of the 1960s, this new work follows the stories of twin sisters Olanna and Kainene, their lovers, their family, and others who inhabit their privileged worlds, soon to be transformed by civil war. From the opening page, on which Adichie describes hedges "trimmed so flat on top that they looked like tables wrapped in leaves," the reader is transported to a world so strongly imaged as to feel like a painting. But, disappointingly, the story line is not as well developed as the setting, and the characters fail to emerge fully. Not as great as the sum of its parts; for larger collections only. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 5/1/06.]-Caroline Hallsworth, City of Greater Sudbury Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.