Half Of A Yellow Sun
(Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie)
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie exploded onto the literary scene with her debut novel; Purple Hisbiscus which told the story of a family torn between a father''s web of religious fanatism and political strife of Nigeria''s 1990 was welcomed by literary critics as a worthwhile introduction into contemporary world literature and a clear voice from African writing. Adichie''s book was thus nominated for the 2005 Orange Prize for fiction.In 2006, she released her much awaited second book titled Half Of A yellow Sun. The book was set in Nigeria''a post-independence times and tells the story of the Biafran War; the Nigerian Civil War of the late 60s and early 70s. She tells the story through a village pre-teen boy Ugwu who grows up in the house of his academic master odenigbo and matures through war. The horrors of war are seen through the ordinariness of life portrayed by Odenigbo, his beautiful wife Olanna and the latter''s twin sister Kainene. The book is divided into several parts including the early years when all seems well and the divide between the North and the South of Nigeria is barely noticeable. It moves on to the part where the bitterness and tension begin to brew and the part where it all comes apart. Half Of A Yellow Sun is not just a book about a war; albeit the first genocide whose pictures shocked the world as it witnessed it as it went on through the photos of starving children shown in western media. It is also about breaking a silence and telling a story that the Nigerian Government has refused to imbibe or discuss in it''s history books, about posterity and furnishing Nigerian and African children with a right to know about whom they are and what went on in history. But above all, this book is about loyalty, love, lust, greed, law and order, tribalism and that base nature which all humans possess.The Orange prize was awarded to Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie for her efforts in Half Of A Yellow Sun in June 2007, making her the youngest writer to be awarded such an honour and the first African Writer to receive it. Adichie who grew up in the University town of Nsukka in South-Eastern Nigeria; the setting of her award winning book and the first academic capital of the Country, lived with her academic parents (who still teach at the University of Nigeria Nsukka) in the house once occupied by the Nigerian literary giant; Chinua Achebe. Could this be where the inspiration came from? Adichie has called Achebe her hero citing him as the master of the raft of writing. Much more than all the literary acclaim that she has enjoyed, Achebe read Adichie''s latest effort and called her a writer who has come "fully formed".
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