Half of a Yellow Sun
As seen:
By Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Adjoa Andoh, Kati Nicholl, and and, Julian Nicholl
avg rating
2 reviews
Winner of the Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction 2007, this is a heartbreaking, exquisitely written literary masterpiece.
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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.
