Half of a Yellow Sun (Hardcover, New title)

This is the sweeping new novel from the author of "Purple Hibiscus", shortlisted for the Orange Prize and winner of the Commonwealth Writers Award. '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.