Half of a Yellow Sun

Adichie's epic novel follows the lives of two twin sisters, Olanna and Kainene, as they navigate both "normal life" of sisterhood, love, and growing into adults and a complicated and violent civil war. The setting is in 1960s Nigeria when the Igbo people attempt to break away from Nigeria into a separate country of Biafra. Commentary on the way colonialism has affected the region runs through the book, but though the politics are present and important, Adichie manages to keep this book about the characters. The sisters and those they love are beautifully created and developed. There is also a strong element of feminism present in the book that is subtly but powerfully drawn. I think my attention was probably drawn to it because of show more reading Rebecca Solnit's essays concurrently.

I really enjoyed this novel. Sometimes a very unfamiliar setting, as this book certainly had for me, leaves me a little confused or distanced from the book, but Adichie has written a book that pushed me out of my comfort zone and taught me a little about Nigeria while grounding her book with characters that have a universal feel. I'd love to read more by her. show less

I didn't know what to expect from this book. It is very sobering. I found it difficult to read at times, the descriptions of what went on during the Biafran War are so honest and un-sensationalised and brutal. I loved it, though. I thought the characters were believable. I appreciated the way Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie knew that most of her readership probably wouldn't know much about the Biafran War, or the social and political structures in Nigeria, but didn't patronise us in the way she presented the background that we needed. Olanna and her sister Kainene on the surface are the main characters in the novel, but for me the heart of the story was Ugwu. He was the most interesting, and I loved how he discovered his own voice as the novel show more progressed. show less

The essence of Half a Yellow Sun is shown in one sentence. Two sisters are touring a refugee camp in Biafra where people are dead and dying of malnutrition: She slapped a fly away from her face and thought how healthy all the flies looked, how alive, how vibrant. Chimamanda Adichie uses pictures like this to show how war nurtures the most vile parts of the human psyche like a body dying of metastatic cancer, the body dies, the cancer is vibrant and healthy. She follows members of an upper class Nigerian family from before, through and in the aftermath of the Nigeria-Biafra civil war. With just a few main characters she shows a variety of experiences of education, art, love, denial, fear, acceptance, corruption, substance abuse, show more starvation, rape and the usual accompaniments to life and war. Highly recommended to anyone who thinks any good can come from war. show less

A thoughtful, well-written novel about the Nigerian civil war. Many of the issues addressed here will be familiar to readers of post-colonial literature, but Adichie's honesty and insight separate this novel from the pack. She's clear-eyed about what it means to live in a divided society and is careful to stay away from stereotypes and easy generalizations. Nigeria's culture of corruption and its social inequalities are addressed head-on, and she doesn't apologize for the experiences of her better educated, more Westernized characters. Even the most admirable characters here aren't fuzzy-headed one-worlders – Adichie allows them to display their own ethnic loyalties and lets them get caught up in the excitement and blindness of war. show more It's these characters' very real imperfections, and Adichie's decision to introduce us to these characters well before the outbreak of hostilities, that will make a reader care about them to the very end.

"Half of a Yellow Sun" is also a novel where you benefit from somebody else's research – I feel like I know much more about the Biafran conflict than I did previously, and I didn't have to plow through any dry history books to learn something about it. It's not a beach read, certainly, but it's recommended. show less

Just begun this and sank right into the style. Like the way she shifts perspective from the houseboy in the first chapter to Olanna in the second.
This is quite a novel. Deceptive start from the point of view of Ugwu and then we are introduced to middle class Nigerians and an Englishmen and then pitched into the civil war of the sixties. The descent into the tragedy and awfulness of war is really well done as is the way various characters change in response to the changing conditions. The novel closes with Ugwu's decision to write the story of the war rather than the English man who had been trying through the whole story to come up with a response in words to Nigeria. I will read more by Adichie.

An important and moving novel about fear, loss, and survival in Biafra’s unsuccessful struggle for independence from Nigeria in the 1960s.

Great literature is both particular and universal. It depicts a specific time, place, and people, even ones totally new to a reader, while at the same time revealing its characters’ universal humanness allowing the reader empathizes with them. Adichie’s novel does just that. I knew little about Nigeria’s civil war beyond the extreme level of suffering which occurred. Yet reading Yellow Sun, I learned not only facts about the war, but more importantly I was drawn into the lives of various participants and felt something of their emotions and resilience. This book is an example of why we needed show more storytelling, not just information, if we are to reach across the experiential gulfs that divide us.

In Yellow Sun, Adichie interweaves several plots and subplots. The most obvious stories are the lives of two couples. The wives are twin sisters, educated and affluent, caught in a love-hate relationship with each other that is central to the book. One husband is a revolutionary professor and the other an Englishman, disillusioned with his own country and its continuing colonial policies. The other core figure is a young boy, Ugwu, who comes to the home of the professor as a houseboy and remains with his family as the story progresses into his adolescence. Seeing Ugwu’s initial reaction to the professor’s home and family and his gradually expanding understanding provides insight into the wide differences among Nigerians.

Having just finished the Real Help reading group about African-American women as domestic servants, I was particularly sensitive to Ugwu and his position as houseboy. While not quite “one of the family,” his position was much more positive than theirs. I am still not sure I understand why. Ugwu was not equal to his Master and Mistress; he was obedient and hard-working. He served meals rather than shared them. The fact that he and they shared allegiance to the Igbo tribe lessened the distance between them. From the beginning his master was determined that Ugwu get a good education and encouraged him to dream of being like the professor someday, something less possible if he had been a girl. Perhaps most importantly, he had no strong lingering responsibility for the family he left behind, nothing but some regret. Unlike the African-American women who divided their loyalty between the family who employed them and their own children and husband, Ugwu had no other focus in his life. And there was no possibility of pregnancy interrupting his commitment to the professor’s family. Race and gender both worked to his advantage.

Adichie is a fine author to be able to accomplish so much in this book. Her book has an amazing coherence for one so filled with various individuals and events. Virtually all her characters were clear and understandable to me, despite their unfamiliarity. (The older man who was the Englishman’s servant and had a family was the most incomprehensible figure in the book for me.) Given all the violence and pain, this could have been a depressing book, but with Adichie’s skill it was not. Scattered throughout were verbal gems that caught my breath.

The book’s title, Half a Yellow Sun, is a reference to the emblem on the flag of Biafra. It reminds me of a comment of Benjamin Franklin at the convention which wrote the US Constitution. Looking at a chair with half a sun carved into its back, he remarked that he wasn’t sure if the sun—and the new nation–was rising or setting. For Biafra, the sun never fully rose. Adichie would have us remember the bravery and the loss in its attempt at independence. And the fact that “The World Was Silent When We Died.”

I am grateful to other bloggers whose praise for Adichie lead me to track down this book.

I recommend it highly to a wide variety of readers. show less

It sort of feels as though Chimamanda Adichie has been following me around Europe. Not literally, of course, but I’ve nearly bought one of her books on at least four occasions on my travels. I rather wish I had because she's a wonderful writer and it would have been rather lovely to have been able to sit on a train for 4 hours at a time burrowing through this book. The book's been reviewed previously so I'll try to keep it brief. Oddly enough for a book that is largely about a civil war it isn't a depressing book, there are certainly moments of tragedy and horror, but they are balanced by joy and laughter. The tight focus of the story on the central characters, keeps the story very much a human story, of lives impacted by civil war show more but not defined by it. I particularly liked the way the twins are written; we never see the story through Kainene's eyes, only ever knowing her feelings from what she tells the other characters, particularly Olanna and Richard, which allows her to remain every bit as much of a mystery to the reader as she does to her sister and her lover. I'll readily admit to knowing very little about Nigeria in the 60s, (There were two history courses at my university for the entire continent of Africa, that they were titled Africa in the 19th Century and Africa in the 20th Century probably tells you everything that was wrong with the courses) so I found the history elements and also the insight into the different strata of Nigerian society, utterly fascinating. Also I would have loved to read either version of The World Was Silent When We Died the little snippets we get were fascinating. show less