HALF OF A YELLOW SUB

Vividly written, thrumming with life, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun is a remarkable novel. In its compassionate intelligence as in its capacity for intimate portraiture, this novel is a worthy successor to such 20th-century classics as Cinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and V.S. Naipaul’s A Bend in the River.Joyce Carol Oates
This highly anticipated new 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 get 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 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 the ways in which love can complicate all of these things.
Immensely powerful and with a sweeping pace, this novel will be one of the most talked-about books of the year.