It doesn’t take long for Ms. Adichie to weave these characters into a finely wrought, inescapable web. In a major leap forward from her impressive debut novel, Purple Hibiscus, she expands expertly and inexorably on these early scenes. And the many-faceted Half of a Yellow Sun soon develops a panoramic span. Taking its title from an emblem on the flag of Biafra, the book sustains an intimate focus and an epic backdrop as Biafra secedes from Nigeria and genocidal hell breaks loose … Ms. Adichie’s symbolic gestures are delivered both forthrightly and with a light touch. In the later part of the story, Olanna and Odenigbo are raising a little girl they call Baby, and the sisters have become estranged. The novel appears too preoccupied with large, ominous changes in Nigerian society to explain these smaller ones, but it turns out Ms. Adichie has saved them for more dramatic effect.
At once historical and eerily current, Half of a Yellow Sun honors the memory of a war largely forgotten outside Nigeria, except as a synonym for famine. But although she uses history to gain leverage on the present, Adichie is a storyteller, not a crusader … Whenever she touches on her favorite themes — loyalty and betrayal — her prose thrums with life. Like Nadine Gordimer, she likes to position her characters at crossroads where public and private allegiances threaten to collide. Both Half of a Yellow Sun and Adichie’s first novel, Purple Hibiscus, explore the gap between the public performances of male heroes and their private irresponsibilities. And both novels shrewdly observe the women — the wives, the daughters — left dangling over that chasm.
A novel that descends into dire hunger begins with Ugwu's devoted creativity in the kitchen, confecting pepper soup, spicy jollof rice and chicken boiled in herbs. Beer and brandy flow as he serves the Master's friends while absorbing snippets of intellectual debate in the era of Sharpeville, de Gaulle in Algeria and the struggle for US civil rights … A history of colonisation is alluded to, not least in the tragicomic figure of Richard's anglophile servant Harrison, who prides himself on serving roast beef and rhubarb crumble, but adapts in wartime to roasting lizards and bush rats ‘as though they were rack of lamb.' While Richard identifies with Biafra and intends to write the history of the war, it is Ugwu who takes up the pen and the mantle.
Half of a Yellow Sun (the book takes its title from the rising sun on the official flag of Biafra) covers the war and the years leading up to it in a sweeping story that provides both a harrowing history lesson and an engagingly human narrative … Adichie shifts points of view among the central characters, keeping their stories always in the foreground. She also alternates between the pre-war and war years, wrapping the emerging political conflict in a rich and involving drama. Olanna and Kainene, embarked on very different roads, become increasingly estranged; both are almost embarrassed by their parents, wealthy dilettantes. A central crisis of unfaithfulness drives the sisters still further apart and threatens Olanna's relationship with Odenigbo. Ugwu, perhaps most engaging of all the characters, grows by book's end from a young boy into a scarred and guilt-ridden battle veteran.
In her second novel, Half of a Yellow Sun, this superbly talented writer has tackled a broader, more ambitious subject: the civil war that took place in the decade before her birth. Between her extensive readings and her family's memories of these events, Adichie clearly has the background and understanding to write such a novel. What's more, she has also found a way of engaging this large subject on the personal level by portraying it vividly and poignantly through the eyes of well-crafted characters … Adichie's novel also explores the depth and stubbornness of ethnic prejudices among Africans: not only Muslims versus Christians, or light-skinned Hausa versus dark-skinned Yoruba and Igbo, but even among members of the same group who come from different classes, different villages or even different families. Although Adichie sharply depicts the dreadful pettiness that's all too often part of human nature, she never loses sight of our capacity to rise above such limitations.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has delivered a big novel about life in modern Nigeria during wartime. The war in question is the Biafran War of the 1960s, during which the southern region of Biafra fought unsuccessfully to secede. The book's title comes from the Biafran flag, a symbol of the rebellion. We get a clear description of the flag's colors from Olanna Ozobia,a beautiful, well educated Igbo woman … The book mainly follows the fortunes of Olana and those of a psychologically fascinating and varied cast of characters, from high society colonials on down to Ojukwu, an Igbo country boy. Though their daily lives and destinies as well are tied to the end of peace and the rise of war, Adichie makes them, above all else, interesting, even compelling, as sharply defined individuals. This lends to the novel a powerful psychological element that we don't always find in historical fiction.
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 … 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.
