Half of a Yellow Sun
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By Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Adjoa Andoh, Kati Nicholl, and Julian Nicholl
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2 reviews
Winner of the Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction 2007, this is a heartbreaking, exquisitely written literary masterpiece.
Now available as a digital download. This highly anticipated novel from Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is set in Nigeria during the 1960s, at the time of a vicious civil war in which a million people died and thousands were massacred in cold blood. The three main characters in the novel are swept up in the violence during these turbulent years. One is a young boy from a poor village who is employed at a university lecturer’s house. The other is a young middle-class woman, Olanna, who has to confront the reality of the massacre of her relatives. And the third is a white man, a writer who lives in Nigeria for no clear reason, and who falls in love with Olanna’s twin sister, a remote and enigmatic character. As these people’s lives intersect, they have to question their own responses to the unfolding political events. This extraordinary novel is about Africa in a wider sense: about moral responsibility, about the end of colonialism, about ethnic allegiances, about class and race; and about the ways in which love can complicate all of these things. TweetReviews
St Just Thursday Evening Reading Group 2nd October 2025.
Half of a Yellow Sun. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.
The reading group generally thought this a difficult read: quite long, a good bit of concentration needed, and a highly serious subject, but we were glad to have read it and considered it well written and thought-provoking, it being mainly concerned with the effects of war upon ordinary people. Most of us, because of cultural unfamiliarity, found the characters’ names difficult to remember. Hardly any of the group knew very much about the subject, though we had distant memories of the conflict over Biafra, and we read that over one million people lost their lives in a cause which came to nothing in the end.
One reader commented that this was really a book written by a woman from a man’s world. It was also seen through the eyes of the intellectual class (with the possible exception of Ugwu). It was also set in the 1960s, but written from a modern perspective.
A very interesting book from which we all learned something.
This was an incredibly well written book, you care so much for the characters and it taught me about a period in history that I knew nothing about.
