Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

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Title: Purple Hibiscus: Description:
A sensitive and touching story of a child exposed too early to religious intolerance and the uglier side of the Nigerian state.

Title: Purple Hibiscus: Description:
A haunting tale of an Africa and an adolescence undergoing tremendous changes by a talented young Nigerian writer. Fifteen-year-old Kambili's world is circumscribed by the high walls of her family compound and the frangipani trees she can see from her bedroom window. Her wealthy Catholic father, although generous and well-respected in the community, is repressive and fanatically religious at home. Her life is lived under his shadow and regulated by schedules: prayer, sleep, study, and more prayer. She lives in fear of his violence and the words in her textbooks begin to turn to blood in front of her eyes. When Nigeria begins to fall apart under a military coup, Kambili's father, involved in mysterious ways with the unfolding political crisis, sends Kambili and her brother away to their aunt's. The house is noisy and full of laughter. Here she discovers love and a life -- dangerous and heathen -- beyond the confines of her father's authority. The visit will lift the silence from her world and, in time, reveal a terrible, bruising secret at the heart of her family life. This first novel is about the promise of freedom; about the blurred lines between the old gods and the new; between

Title: Half Of A Yellow Sun: Description:
The sweeping novel from the author of 'Purple Hibiscus', shortlisted for the Orange Prize, and winner of the Commonwealth Writers Award. This highly anticipated 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 are 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 twin 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 about the ways in which love can complicate all of these things. From the Publisher The Stories of Africa: a Q & A with Chimamanda Ngozi AdichiQ: What led you to write a book about the Nigeria-Biafra war?I wrote this novel because I wanted to write about love and war, because I grew up in the shadow of Biafra, because I lost both grandfathers in the Nigeria-Biafra war, because I wanted to engage with my history in order to make sense of my present, because many of the issues that led to the war remain unresolved in Nigeria today, because my father has tears in his eyes when he speaks of losing his father, because my mother still cannot speak at length about losing her father in a refugee camp, because the brutal bequests of colonialism make me angry, because the thought of the egos and indifference of men leading to the unnecessary deaths of men and women and children enrages me, because I don't ever want to forget. I have always known that I would write a novel about Biafra. At 16, I wrote an awfully melodramatic play called For Love of Biafra. Years later, I wrote short stories, That Harmattan Morning, Half of a Yellow Sun and Ghosts, all dealing with the war. I felt that I had to approach the subject with little steps, paint on a smaller canvas first, before starting the novel.Q: Given that at the time of the war you hadn't yet been born, what sort of research did you do to prepare for writing this book?I read books. I looked at photos. I talked to people. In the four years that it took to finish the book, I would often ask older people I met, `Where were you in 1967?' and then take it from there. It was from stories of that sort that I found out tiny details that are important for fiction. My parents' stories formed the backbone of my research. Still, I have a lot of research notes that I did not end up using because I did not want to be stifled by fact, did not want the political events to overwhelm the human story.Q: Are memories of the Nigeria-Biafra war still alive in Nigeria, talked about on a regular basis, or do you feel that the conflict is being lost to history as time passes and that it becomes less important to Igbo culture?The war is still talked about, still a potent political issue. But I find that it is mostly talked about in uninformed and unimaginative ways. People repeat the same things they have been told without having a full grasp of the complex nature of the war or they hold militant positions lacking in nuance. It also remains, to my surprise, very ethnically divisive: the (brave enough) Igbo talk about it and the non-Igbo think the Igbo should get over it. There is a new movement called MASSOB, the Movement for the Actualization of the Sovereign State of Biafra, which in the past few years has captured the imagination of many Igbo people. MASSOB is controversial; it is reported to engage in violence and its leaders are routinely arrested and harassed by the government. Still, despite its inchoate objectives, MASSOB's grassroots support continues to grow. I think this is because it gives a voice to many issues that have been officially swept aside by the country but which continue to resonate for many Igbo people.Q: The book focuses on the experiences of a small set of people who are experiencing the conflict from very different points of view. When we step into their individual worlds, we don't know their every thought - the narrator who follows them isn't omniscient - but rather we seem to see and understand them through a film. Can you describe your narrative style and why you framed these characters the way you did?I actually don't think of them as being seen through a `film'. I have always been suspicious of the omniscient narrative. It has never appealed to me, always seemed a little lazy and a little too easy. In an introduction to the brilliant Italian writer Giovanni Verga's novel, it is said about his treatment of his characters that he `never lets them analyze their impulses but simply lets them be driven by them'. I wanted to write characters who are driven by impulses that they may not always be consciously aware of, which I think is true for us human beings. Besides, I didn't want to bore my reader - and myself - to death, exploring the characters' every thought.Q: The character Richard is a British white expatriate who considers himself Biafran, drawing a certain amount of quiet- and some loud- criticism for his self-proclaimed identity. Another key narrator, Ugwu, is a 13-year-old houseboy who reacts rather than acts. Both are interesting choices for characters for the narrator to `shadow'. Why did you pick them?Ugwu was inspired in part by Mellitus, who was my parents' houseboy during the war; in part by Fide, who was our houseboy when I was growing up. And I have always been interested in the less obvious narrators. When my mom spoke about Mellitus, what a blessing he was, how much he helped her, how she did not know what she would have done without him, I remember being moved but also thinking that he could not possibly have been the saint my mother painted, that he must have been flawed and human. I think that Ugwu does come to act more and react less as we watch him come into his own. Richard was a more difficult choice. I very much wanted somebody to be the Biafran `outsider' because I think that outsiders played a major role in the war but I wanted him, also, to be human and real - and needy! From the Author In the Shadow of Biafra by Chimamanda Ngozi AdichieI taught an introductory creative writing class at Princeton last year and, in addition to the classic `show don't tell', I often told my students that their fiction needed to have `emotional truth'. I am not sure whether they knew exactly what `emotional truth' meant. Sometimes I was not sure that I did either, or perhaps it was simply that I could never fully define it. I could, however, recognize it whenever I saw it: a quality different from honesty and more resilient than fact, a quality that existed not in the kind of fiction that explains but in the kind of fiction that shows. All the novels I love, the ones I remember, the ones I re-read, have this empathetic human quality. And because I write the kind of fiction I like to read, when I started Half of a Yellow Sun, set before and during the Nigeria-Biafra war of 1967-1970, I hoped that emotional truth would be its major recognizable trait.I hoped, too, that it would be the kind of character-driven war novel brave enough to engage subtly with politics, as the Zimbabwean writer Shimmer Chinodya does in his remarkable Harvest of Thorns. What struck me most about Harvest of Thorns was that I emerged from it with a complex portrait of Zimbabwe's war of independence from - at last - the point of view of black Zimbabweans without ever feeling as if I had been lectured. The wonderfully restrained sense of deep disappointment underlying Chinodya's narrative reminded me of how similar the histories of many African countries are, how passionately people believed in ideas that would eventually disappoint them, in people that would betray them, in futures that would elude them. The Biafra stories in Chinua Achebe's Girls at War and Other Stories are also about what happens when the shiny things we once believed in begin to rust before our eyes. Achebe's trademark compassionate irony - he respects his characters but at the same time is amused by them and expects the reader to be also - is not very obvious in Sugar Baby, which is the best piece of fiction I have read about Biafra. It starts with the narrator watching his friend Cletus fling a handful of sugar out of the window. A symbolic act: Cletus is an unqualified sweet tooth (something he must have developed as a student living in Ladbroke Grove) and the unbearable sugar scarcity in Biafra led to humiliations, one involving the loss of his girlfriend, another the rage of an Irish priest. Now that the war is over, Cletus and his friends are eager to tell self-flagellating stories of hardship, they `had become in those days like a bunch of old hypochondriac women vying to recount the most lurid details of their own special infirmities.' The narrator is reluctant to join in. For him, there is something still too painful, too sacred, about their recent history; he is not yet ready to laugh at the once-shiny rusted things. Girls at War portrays a world inhabited by people who feel their metaphysical losses more strongly than their material ones. Their disillusion, their manic self-mockery, their fixation on survival, are all corollaries of their deep faith in their cause. Achebe's war fiction then, humane and pragmatic as it is, becomes an oblique paean to the possibilities that Biafra held. The stories have an emotional power that accumulate in an unobtrusive way and stun the reader at the end; there are sentences in them that will always move me to tears. Successful fiction does not need to be validated by `real life'; I cringe whenever a writer is asked how much of a novel is `real'. Yet, I find myself thinking differently about these two war novels I admire. I have often wondered how much of the character Benjamin in Harvest of Thorns mirrors Shimmer Chinodya, how much of the muted defeat in Girls at War is in fact what Chinua Achebe himself felt about the loss of Biafra. Perhaps it is because to write realistic fiction about a war, especially one central to the history of one's country, is to be constantly aware of a responsibility to something larger than art. While writing Half of a Yellow Sun, I enjoyed playing with minor things: inventing a train station in a town that has none, placing towns closer to each other than they are, changing the chronology of conquered towns. Yet I did not play with the central events of that time. I could not let a character be changed by anything that had not actually happened. If fiction is indeed the soul of history, then I was equally committed to the fiction and the history, equally keen to be true to the spirit of the time as well as to my artistic vision of it. The writing itself was a bruising experience. I struggled to maintain many fragile balances. I cried often, was frequently crippled with doubt and anxiety, often wondered whether to stop or to scale back. But there were also moments of extravagant joy when I recognized, in a character or moment or scene, that quality of emotional truth. About the Author Life at a Glance Born: 15 September 1 1977 in Nigeria. Adichie is from Abba, in Anambra State, but grew up in the university town of Nsukka where she briefly studied medicine and pharmacy. Educated: University Primary and Secondary Schools, Nsukka; Eastern Connecticut State University, Connecticut; Johns Hopkins University, Maryland; Yale University, Connecticut Career to date: First novel Purple Hibiscus published in 2003. It was shortlisted for the Orange Prize and the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, and won the Commonwealth Writers' Best First Book Prize. Her short fiction won the International PEN/David Wong Award in the same year. She has just completed a year as a Creative Writing lecturer at Princeton University. Lives: New Haven, Connecticut and Nsukka, Nigeria Family: Fantastic parents; two sisters; three brothers; three nephews; three nieces; two brothers-in-law; one sister-in-law Top Ten Favourite Novels Arrow of God by Chinua AchebeThe Street by Ann PetryThe Time of Our Singing by Richard PowersThe African Child by Camara LayeA Woman in Berlin by AnonymousAnother Country by James BaldwinThe Only Son by John Munonye

Title: Half Of A Yellow Sun: Description:
1960's Nigeria. Biafran war.

Title: Purple Hibiscus: Description:
Fifteen year old Kambili lives in fear of her father, a charismatic yet violent Catholic patriarch who, although generous and well-respected in the community, is repressive and fanatically religious at home. Escape and the discovery of a new, liberated way of life comes when Nigeria is shaken by a military coup, forcing Kambili and her brother to live at their aunt's home, a noisy place full of laughter. The visit will lift the silence from her world and, in time, unlock a terrible, bruising secret at the heart of her family life.