Half of a Yellow Sun

De: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Narrado por: Zainab Jah

NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FINALIST • From the award-winning, bestselling author of Americanah and We Should All Be Feminists—a haunting story of love and war. • Recipient of the Women’s Prize for Fiction “Winner of Winners” award.

With effortless grace, celebrated author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie illuminates a seminal moment in modern African history: Biafra's impassioned struggle to establish an independent republic in southeastern Nigeria during the late 1960s. We experience this tumultuous decade alongside five unforgettable characters: Ugwu, a thirteen-year-old houseboy who works for Odenigbo, a university professor full of revolutionary zeal; Olanna, the professor’s beautiful young mistress who has abandoned her life in Lagos for a dusty town and her lover’s charm; and Richard, a shy young Englishman infatuated with Olanna’s willful twin sister Kainene.

Half of a Yellow Sun is a tremendously evocative novel of the promise, hope, and disappointment of the Biafran war.

A Little Background Adjustment

This was read beautifully. How does one say it was enjoyed considering the story of a terrible war.
It was unfortunate that the author threw in the ugly American journalists bit when there were actually several journalists of the most noted newspapers...NYTimes, Los Angeles Times, Time/Life,Newsweek who made their homes in Nairobi Kenya and went to Biafra risking their lives to tell the story of this horrible war. They traveled together to Biafra and when Priya Ramrakha, the Time/Life photographer,was shot in a Biafran ambush, these journalists carried him as best they could to safety. He bled to death. I know this to be true as my former husband was one of them. These journalists cared about what was happening in Africa. They tried to communicate the real story.

Brilliantly read

I’ve never heard of the Nigerian war, so the story was illuminating. The author was able to include many cultural norms of Nigerian family dynamics that created a richness of the story and added some humor in an otherwise sad book. It was heavy on my heart, so it was difficult to get through.

If it hasn’t been for the reader, I probably would have not finished. She executed so many accents that I was in awe of her. She’s from England and Sierra Leon, so she switched between accents and dialects easily. Even her southern American accent was good.

If you’re tender hearted like I am, you may want to skip this book, despite it being very well written and read. But if you want to learn about Nigerian history and culture, you’ll enjoy this.

To the reviewer who said she didn’t know how to pronounce Igbo, just... ugh.

Powerful

An amazing story of such a hard piece of history. I learned so much. I laughed, I cried, I wanted more.

awesome narration!

the author's writing is vivid and beautiful, but is exquisitely animated bye the narration of Zainab Jah.

An absolute masterpiece

There are not enough stars in the rating system to commend this book. And the narrator, too, in Zainab Jah: just wow. I'm a Nigerian American who spent my first several years of life in Nigeria, and the narrator's authentic rendering of Nigerianisms and expressions took me back. But you don't have to be a Nigerian to appreciate this book. You just have to be a lover of fine writing. Well done, Ms. Adichie.