Half of a Yellow Sun

A New York Times Notable Book
A Richard & Judy Book Club Selection
Recipient of the Women's Prize for Fiction "Winner of Winners" Award
A National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist
Finalist for the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Best Book (Africa Region)

"A gorgeous, pitiless account of love, violence and betrayal during the Biafran war."
--Time

"A landmark novel, whose clear, undemonstrative prose can so precisely delineate nuance. . . . She brings to it a lucid intelligence and compassion, and a heartfelt plea for memory."
--The Guardian (UK)

"At once historical and eerily current, Half of a Yellow Sun honors the memory of [that] war. Adichie's prose thrums with life. . . . Adichie approaches her country's past violence with a blend of distance and familial obsession. This tug of detachment and intimacy gives Half of a Yellow Sun an empathetic tone that never succumbs to simplifying impulses, heroic or demonic. . . . Reaching deep, [Half of a Yellow Sun] takes us inside ordinary lives laid waste by the all too ordinary unraveling of nation states. It speaks through history to our war-racked age not through abstract analogy but through the energy of vibrant detail, [and] a mastery of small things."  
--The New York Times Book Review

"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. . . . It is this kind of unflinching insight into her nation and its peoples that makes Half of a Yellow Sun a profoundly humanistic work of literature that bears comparison with the best fiction of Nigeria and, indeed, the entire African continent." 
--San Francisco Chronicle

"[Adichie's] second novel leaves you reeling at the horrors people can inflict on one another. . . . The stark maturity of its vision is so startling that the great African novelist Chinua Achebe refused to believe the book could have been written by someone so young."
--National Post

"Adichie's novel [has], a narrative humility coupled with an epic ambition . . . Are there any easy answers in [Half of a Yellow Sun]? Certainly not. But Adichie, in the process, asks the hell out of her questions, rendering them in all their haunting, beautiful silence."
--The Harvard Book Review

"Ingenious . . . Gentle, forbearing and sensitive, [the character] Olanna serves as a kind of touchstone throughout the novel. [Readers] will acutely feel her pain-along with her enduring capacity for compassion, indignation and love. . . . [With] searching insight, compassion and an unexpected yet utterly appropriate touch of wit, Adichie has created an extraordinary book, a worthy addition to the world's great tradition of large-visioned, powerfully realistic novels."
--Los Angeles Times

"A protean work of the imagination that is all the more remarkable at having been written by someone who isn't yet thirty. The novel 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."
--Denver Post

"[An] artful page-turner. . . . [A] profoundly gripping story. This dramatic, intelligent epic has its lush and sultry side as well. . . . 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."
--Publishers Weekly

"We do not usually associate wisdom with beginners, but here is a new writer endowed with the gift of ancient storytellers. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie knows what is at stake, and what to do about it. Her experimentation with the dual mandate of English and Igbo in perennial discourse is a case in point. Timid and less competent writers would avoid the complication altogether, but Adichie embraces it because her story needs it. 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

"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 proves herself a talented and ambitious writer with [this] far-reaching and engrossing historical novel. . . . Adichie's fully realized and finely observed characters hook the reader and carry the story through wrenching events to its sorrowful, tragic conclusion. . . . [Her] clear-sighted examination reveals how quickly national loyalties, even when rooted in seemingly just causes, can become entangled with self-absorption, denial and even cruelty. 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. . . . Half of a Yellow Sun [ensures] that precious memories have been given eloquent and far-reaching voices. [A] heart-stopping [tribute] to that unbreakable human bond, love."
--Chicago Tribune

"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 novel reflects on language both as a means of communication, and of identity, which may be a threat or a means of belonging."
--The Times (UK)

"Funny, heartbreaking, exquisitely written, and, without doubt, a literary masterpiece and a classic."
--Daily Mail (UK)

"In her eloquent and passionate prose, the heat, the smells, the sensuality and color of Africa leap from the pages. Her characters are finely drawn and vibrantly alive. . . . Through her main characters, [Adichie] teases out the class, race and economic conflicts that are endemic in her country. Her novel explores the issues of moral responsibility, the legacies of colonialism, the consequences of ethnic ties, class and race and how relationships on a personal level intertwine and interact on these."
--Morning Star (UK)