Half of a Yellow Sun

Half of a Yellow Sun is a 2006 novel by Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. It became instantly successful after its publication; in the United States and Nigeria, it is widely read in high schools and middle schools. Half of a Yellow Sun won the Women's Prize for Fiction a year after its release. The plot and characters are fictional, and loosely based on Adichie's observations of her father's stories about the Nigerian Civil War and the aftermath, and the family visits to her hometown of Abba, Anambra State, when she was thirteen.

The story, which is set in Nigeria in the 1960s, centers on Ugwu, who left his village to become a houseboy for a revolutionary and professor Odenigbo. Odenigbo loves Olanna, the daughter of a rich Nigerian man. The Nigerian government is overthrown in a coup d'etat, and the Hausas from the Northern region accuses the Igbos from the Eastern region. Another coup emerges and many soldiers from the Igbo tribe are killed.

Despite dealing with the serious issues of colonialism, and racial inequality, the novel is renowned for its depiction of the war. As a Bildungsroman, the primary themes of Half of a Yellow Sun involve loyalty, betrayal and war. Scholars have noted that Adichie also uses a love story that includes people from various regions and social classes of Nigeria, and how the war and encounters with refugees changed them, hence, addressed the issue of class and gender roles in a contemporary Nigerian society. Despite its themes, Half of a Yellow Sun was banned in some American school districts of Michigan, Florida, and Utah, citing its sexual and violent imagery.

Reaction to the novel varied widely upon publication. Despite the number of copies sold and its widespread use in education, literary analysis generally praised the novel's depictions of the Biafran War and the relationships between the characters but disagreed on the effectiveness of the narrative's pace. It was adapted into a film of the same name in 2013 by director Biyi Bandele, and produced by Gail Egan and British film and television producer Andrea Calderwood.