Title: Half of a Yellow Sun
Author: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichied
Context: Half of a Yellow Sun (2006) is a post colonial haunting, masterly novel by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichied. A seminal moment in the modern history of Africa is recreated in this novel. The novel tells about the emotional struggle of Biafra to establish an independent republic in the 1960s in Nigeria and the aftermath of the horrifying violence. The turbulence of the decade sweeps off the life of 3 characters. The author, a naturally graceful storyteller, presents the lives of these characters.
Synopsis: Ugwu is a 13 year old who works for a university professor, as a houseboy. The professor full of revolutionary passion also has a beautiful looking mistress named Olanna. To enjoy the charisma of the professor and the dusty university town she gives up her privileged life in Lagos. A young and shy Englishman, Richard is in the control of the twin sister of Olanna. Being enigmatic he is unwilling to be controlled by anyone. Ideals of all the three characters are tested severely when they have to run to save their lives from the advancing Nigerian troops. All the three have allegiances to one another.
Half of a Yellow Sun is an ambitious, epic, remarkable and triumphantly realized novel about ethnic loyalties, the end of colonialism, about race, class and moral responsibility and ways in which all can get complicated with love. The most intensely emotional, dramatic and powerful pictures of modern Africa ever, are put forward by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichied’s brilliant novel.
Other works by the Author:
2003 – Purple Hibiscus
2009 – The Thing Around Your Neck
2013 – Americanah
Essays published in book format
2014 – We Should All Be Feminists
2017 – Dear Ijeawele, or A Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions
Short Fiction
2013 – Checking out
2015 – Apollo
2016 – The Arrangements’: A Work of Fiction
