Random House
Price: $24.95
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CHIMAMANDA NGOZI ADICHIE reads from her novel Half a Yellow Sun
Harvard Book Store is pleased to announce that on Tuesday, October 10th Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, the author of Purple Hibiscus, will read from and discuss her new novel Half a Yellow Sun.
A masterly, haunting new novel from a writer heralded by The Washington Post Book World as “the twenty-first-century daughter of Chinua Achebe,” Half of a Yellow Sun re-creates a seminal moment in modern African history: Biafra’s impassioned struggle to establish an independent republic in Nigeria in the 1960s, and the chilling violence that followed.
With empathy and grace, Adichie weaves together the lives of three characters swept up in the turbulence of the decade. Thirteen-year-old Ugwu is employed as a houseboy for a university professor full of revolutionary zeal. Olanna is the professor’s beautiful mistress, who has abandoned her life of privilege in Lagos for a dusty university town and the charisma of her new lover. And Richard is a shy young Englishman in thrall to Olanna’s twin sister, an enigmatic figure who refuses to belong to anyone. As Nigerian troops advance and the three must run for their lives, their ideals are severely tested, as are their loyalties to one another.
Harvard Book Store buyer Megan S. says of this book, “With Half of a Yellow Sun, Aidichie manages to create a novel that equals her stunning debut Purple Hibiscus. While her first book dealt with one family, this new book covers a more epic scale without losing what she does best, write a gripping story with wonderful and heartbreaking characters.”
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Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie grew up in Nigeria. Her work has been translated into thirty languages and has appeared in various publications, including The O. Henry Prize Stories, 2003; The New Yorker; Granta; the Financial Times; and Zoetrope. Her most recent novel, Half of a Yellow Sun, won the Orange Broadband Prize and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; it was a New York Times Notable Book and a People and Black Issues Book Review Best Book of the Year. Her first novel, Purple Hibiscus, won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award. A recipient of a 2008 MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, she divides her time between the United States and Nigeria.
Photo: Beowulf Sheehan / PEN American Center.
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