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Kelsey Ford: From the Stacks: J. M. Ledgard's Submergence (0 comment)
Our blog feature, "From the Stacks," features our booksellers’ favorite older books: those fortuitous used finds, underrated masterpieces, and lesser known treasures. Basically: the books that we’re the most passionate about handselling. This week, we’re featuring Kelsey F.’s pick, Submergence by J. M. Ledgard...
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  • Kelsey Ford: Five Book Friday: Year of the Rabbit (1 comment)
  • Kelsey Ford: Powell's Picks Spotlight: Grady Hendrix's 'How to Sell a Haunted House' (0 comment)

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Half of A Yellow Sun

by Chimamanda Adichie
Half of A Yellow Sun

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ISBN13: 9781400044160
ISBN10: 1400044162
Condition: Standard
DustJacket: Standard

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Awards

2007 Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction

The Rooster 2007 Morning News Tournament of Books Nominee

Synopses & Reviews

Publisher Comments

A masterly, haunting new novel from a writer heralded by the Washington Post Book World as "the 21st-century daughter of Chinua Achebe," Half of a Yellow Sun re-creates a seminal moment in modern African history: Biafra's impassioned struggle to establish an independent republic in Nigeria in the 1960s, and the chilling violence that followed.

With astonishing empathy and the effortless grace of a natural storyteller, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie weaves together the lives of three characters swept up in the turbulence of the decade. Thirteen-year-old Ugwu is employed as a houseboy for a university professor full of revolutionary zeal. Olanna is the professor's beautiful mistress, who has abandoned her life of privilege in Lagos for a dusty university town and the charisma of her new lover. And Richard is a shy young Englishman in thrall to Olanna's twin sister, an enigmatic figure who refuses to belong to anyone. As Nigerian troops advance and the three must run for their lives, their ideals are severely tested, as are their loyalties to one another.

Epic, ambitious, and triumphantly realized, Half of a Yellow Sun is a remarkable novel about moral responsibility, about the end of colonialism, about ethnic allegiances, about class and race — and the ways in which love can complicate them all. Adichie brilliantly evokes the promise and the devastating disappointments that marked this time and place, bringing us one of the most powerful, dramatic, and intensely emotional pictures of modern Africa that we have ever had.

Review

"Astonishing...fierce and beautifully written....Half of a Yellow Sun is honest and cutting, and always, always human, always loving....[A]mbitious, impeccably researched....Penetrating...epic and confident. Adichie refuses to look away." Binyavanga Wainaina, author of Discovering Home

Review

"When I think of how many European and American writers rehash the themes of suburban adultery or unhappy childhood, I look with awe and envy at this young woman from Africa who is recording the history of her country. She is fortunate — and we, her readers, are even luckier." Edmund White

Review

"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

Review

"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

Review

"Although there is nothing ostentatiously writerly about the straightforward style of Half of a Yellow Sun, Ms. Adichie can make a large, resonant gesture when need be." Janet Maslin, New York Times

Review

"Adichie, born seven years after the war, puts a powerfully human face on this sobering story, which is far from over." Seattle Times

Review

"This book confirms the notion that if you want to understand a country's past, certainly you should read historical and economic texts. If you want to understand its soul, however, read its fiction." Minneapolis Star Tribune

Review

"Adichie's 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." Newsday

Synopsis

With her award-winning debut novel, Purple Hibiscus, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie was heralded by the Washington Post Book World as "the 21st century daughter of Chinua Achebe." Now, in her masterly, haunting new novel, she recreates a seminal moment in modern African history: Biafra's impassioned struggle to establish an independent republic in Nigeria during the 1960s.

With the effortless grace of a natural storyteller, Adichie weaves together the lives of five characters caught up in the extraordinary tumult of the decade. Fifteen-year-old Ugwu is houseboy to Odenigbo, a university professor who sends him to school, and in whose living room Ugwu hears voices full of revolutionary zeal. Odenigbo's beautiful mistress, Olanna, a sociology teacher, is running away from her parents' world of wealth and excess; Kainene, her urbane twin, is taking over their father's business; and Kainene's English lover, Richard, forms a bridge between their two worlds. As we follow these intertwined lives through a military coup, the Biafran secession and the subsequent war, Adichie brilliantly evokes the promise, and intimately, the devastating disappointments that marked this time and place.

Epic, ambitious and triumphantly realized, Half of a Yellow Sun is a more powerful, dramatic and intensely emotional picture of modern Africa than any we have had before.

Synopsis

Adichie recreates a seminal moment in modern African history: Biafra's impassioned struggle to establish an independent republic in Nigeria during the 1960s. She weaves together the lives of five characters caught up in the extraordinary tumult of the decade.

Synopsis

An exquisite, blistering debut novel Three brothers tear their way through childhood— smashing tomatoes all over each other, building kites from trash, hiding out when their parents do battle, tiptoeing around the house as their mother sleeps off her graveyard shift. Paps and Ma are from Brooklyn—hes Puerto Rican, shes white—and their love is a serious, dangerous thing that makes and unmakes a family many times. Life in this family is fierce and absorbing, full of chaos and heartbreak and the euphoria of belonging completely to one another. From the intense familial unity felt by a child to the profound alienation he endures as he begins to see the world, this beautiful novel reinvents the coming-of-age story in a way that is sly and punch-in-the-stomach powerful. Written in magical language with unforgettable images, this is a stunning exploration of the viscerally charged landscape of growing up, how deeply we are formed by our earliest bonds, and how we are ultimately propelled at escape velocity toward our futures.

Synopsis

A debut novel that is a brilliant exploration of a close, complicated family and the struggle between brotherhood and becoming an individual 


About the Author

JUSTIN TORRES is a graduate of the Iowa Writers Workshop and a recent Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford. He was the recipient of a Rolón Fellowship in Literature from United States Artists and the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's, Granta, Tin House, and Glimmer Train. Among many other things, he has worked as a farmhand, a dog walker, a creative writing teacher, and a bookseller; he is now a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard.


Table of Contents

We Wanted More 1

Never-Never Time 4

Heritage 8

Seven 12

The Lake 18

Us Proper 24

Lina 30

Other Locusts 33

Talk to Me 39

You Better Come 44

Night Watch 52

Big-Dick Truck 61

Ducks 66

Trench 75

Trash Kites 82

Wasnt No One to Stop This 86

Niagara 98

The Night I Am Made 103

Zookeeping 125

Acknowledgments 127


4.9 7

What Our Readers Are Saying

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Average customer rating 4.9 (7 comments)

`
marlenepinto , September 17, 2008
What an amazing book!!!! I picked it up for one of the most irrational reasons - I liked the look of the cover - and it's a decision I'll never regret. This is my first introduction to African writing and it completely had me hooked - for a person who was never interested in history, this has whetted my appetite for more such writing. A historical period woven into a dramatic, sensitive and emotional tale with an effortless style, a must buy for any book lover.

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`
j_sochi , March 07, 2008
I AM STILL SEARCHING FOR THIS BOOK, BUT BY WHAT AM READING THROUGH THE NET, I CAN STILL RECOMMEND THIS BOOK TO EVERY CULTURE LOVING IGBO MAN. THE AFTERMATHS OF THE BIAFRA WAR IS ALSO SCORCHING ME, IN FACT I LOVE THIS NOVEL, IS HIGHLY RECOMMENDED.

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sweat , June 10, 2007
it is a good thing when history is not forgotten. now , the question is what do we do withat history and what lessons have we learned from that history? i am a nigerian with a mixed heritage between yoruba and benin. i cannot imagine myself beng an igbo and the suffering i would suffered in that period of unrest in nigerian history. and i think that yoruba and igbos should formed a unit against the hausas...in the north. but, having said that ...i don't think that any country would have allowed part of her country to break-away peacefully..no matter how noble the cause. if there was a biafran- republic, which would include the people from delta region, and remember the delta has the largest oil reserve in nigeria. do you think the igbos would allow them to break away peacefully..if they decide to do so for whatever reason?

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`
Ayodeji Olayemi , May 11, 2007 (view all comments by Ayodeji Olayemi)
HALF OF A YELLOW SUN Leafing through ?Half of a Yellow Sun? on the shelf of our university bookshop, I almost didn?t take it. But after settling down on a sofa at home to turn the first page, I just couldn?t drop the novel. What I would have missed! I first came in contact with Chimamanda?s style in ?Purple Hibiscus?, her maiden novel. I would describe her first book as great writing. But Half of a Yellow Sun is a quantum leap, unveiling additional aspects to the author, evolving down many paths, and exploring ? with admirable comfort - a subject as imposing as the Nigerian civil war. Great writing, and a great story. Here again Chimamada is the master of delicious detail, first-rate for expressing the most private thoughts and feelings, sometimes with an eerie bent ? like the whole passage where she describes Ugwu lying wounded in a hospital, half dreaming. And in this book the characters take on real flesh and blood; there?s drama. The plot starts out simply enough, then, slyly, slips into the most unexpected twists. Peaceful nights of wine and intellectual argument in a university community are taken over by days in a bunker with screaming bombs overhead, starvation and stark inhumanity. Twin sisters, who were not the best of friends to begin with, find themselves involved in a love triangle that, paradoxically, along with the war and all the other traumatic experiences that alter their lives, serves to drive them closer. I?ll not be forgetting the characters in a hurry: Odenigbo ? Confident, strong and sure of himself. The series of life-changing events that span the book, however, wear him down and leave him exhausted in the end, a husk of his former self. Olanna ? Strikingly beautiful. Her rich parents expect her to marry a rich suitor to expand the family business. But instead she falls in love with Odenigbo and her whole role in the book seems defined by, and appears to revolve round, him. This love is to lead her down a descending spiral of circumstances and situations ? being cheated upon, living in unaccustomed squalor, carrying a baby around for Odenigbo through the war; a baby that was not born by her. Are her actions borne out of a high sense of steadfastness or low self-esteem? Kainene ? Olanna?s enigmatic twin sister, blowing perfect smoke-rings from her cigarette and coolly pronouncing judgement on others. When she speaks it is with an acerbic, biting wit. It is interesting that Kainene turned out herself to be the greatest irony of all - she, the most unlikely person, became in the end the strength and rallying point that all the others turned to. And then she disappeared from the scene?suddenly, utterly. Half of a Yellow Sun is much more than just an enjoyable novel, it carries promise and stature. It is written by a Nigerian, about a Nigerian setting. But its quality will be appreciated by any eyes that encounter it ? black or white, Nigerian or foreign. It is indeed a classic, representing the leading edge of Nigerian literature for our time, the way Chinua Achebe?s ?Things Fall Apart? was during his ? but now maybe even more so.

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`
mycreationn , May 08, 2007
while chimamanda was still writing this book i watched a tv program where she was interviewed.the program was today's woman.hearing her talk agout her passion brought my hopes alive.i am 27 married with a one year old son and i believe nigerians should wake up and take interest in their PAST.IT tells us who we are. good and revealing piece

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tmllagboola , April 04, 2007
Though i was born a year after the civil war, but i have never been told the story of the happenings during biafra like this, the brutality was so glaring to me reading the novel i felt transported back to biafra war and i became part of it .

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toyinadedeji , November 02, 2006
truely interesting read. Solved my gift picks for friends this holiday season.

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Product Details

ISBN:
9781400044160
Binding:
Hardcover
Publication date:
09/12/2006
Publisher:
ALFRED A KNOPF
Pages:
435
Height:
1.48IN
Width:
6.60IN
Thickness:
1.25
Number of Units:
1
Copyright Year:
2006
UPC Code:
2801400044162
Author:
Justin Torres
Author:
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Author:
Chimamanda Adichie
Subject:
History
Subject:
Historical fiction
Subject:
Political fiction
Subject:
Literature-A to Z
Subject:
Nigeria

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