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Half of a yellow sun

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The sweeping novel from the author of 'Purple Hibiscus', shortlisted for the Orange Prize, and winner of the Commonwealth Writers Award.

This highly anticipated novel from Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is 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.

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Product Details
Fourth Estate Ltd
0007200285 / 9780007200283
Paperback / softback
823.92
15/01/2007
United Kingdom
English
Contemporary classics
433 p.
20 cm
general Learn More
Reprint. Originally published: London: Fourth Estate, 2006.
/ Key title / Includes PS Section The sweeping novel from the author of 'Purple Hibiscus', shortlisted for the Orange Prize, and winner of the Commonwealth Writers Award. / The most significant African novel since Chinua Achebe's 'Things Fall Apart'. / 'Purple Hibiscus' was shortlisted for the Orange Prize and the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize and won the Commonwealth Writer's Prize. / 'Purple Hibiscus' was an internationally acclaimed first novel which has sold over 100,000 copies in the British Commonwealth and 70,000 copies in the UK alone. / Competition: J.M. Coetzee, Arundhati Roy
/ Key title / Includes PS Section The sweeping novel from the author of 'Purple Hibiscus', shortlisted for the Orange Prize, and winner of the Commonwealth Writers Award. / The most significant African novel since Chinua Achebe's 'Things Fall Apart'. / 'Purple Hibiscus' was shortlisted for the Orange Prize and the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize and won the Commonwealth Writer's Prize. / 'Purple Hibiscus' was an internationally acclaimed first novel which has sold over 100,000 copies in the British Commonwealth and 70,000 copies in the UK alone. / Competition: J.M. Coetzee, Arundhati Roy FA Modern & contemporary fiction (post c 1945)