Half of a Yellow Sun

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Half of a Yellow Sun, published in 2006, is set in Nigeria in the 1960s. Ugwu is a thirteen-year-old village boy who leaves home to become the houseboy of Odenigbo, a mathematics professor with radical politics, in the university town of Nsukka, where the professor's house is a gathering place for friends and colleagues arguing over the future of a post-colonial Africa. Into that household comes Olanna, the educated daughter of a wealthy Lagos family, who gives up a life of privilege to live with Odenigbo, along with Olanna's twin Kainene, who is involved with Richard, an English writer, and who manages the family business.

The novel is told in four parts that move back and forth between the early and the late 1960s rather than in sequence, so the reader learns what the household in Nsukka becomes alongside what it had been. When the Nigerian Civil War breaks out in 1967, the lives of Ugwu, Odenigbo and Olanna are thrown into disorder, and the settled world of the university town gives way to displacement, hunger and the constant need to move.

Half of a Yellow Sun was Adichie's second novel and received the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, which recognises work dealing with racism and cultural diversity.