Book Review: Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Publisher: Einaudi

Published: 10 June 2008 (first published 2006)

Pages: 456

Challenges: Library Challenge; Around the World Challenge; Women's Challenge

Rating: 4.5/5

  

Blurb

In 1960s Nigeria, a country blighted by civil war, three lives intersect. Ugwu, a boy from a poor village, works as a houseboy for a university professor. Olanna, a young woman, has abandoned her life of privilege in Lagos to live with her charismatic new lover, the professor. And Richard, a shy English writer, is in thrall to Olanna's enigmatic twin sister. As the horrific Biafran War engulfs them, they are thrown together and pulled apart in ways they had never imagined.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's masterpiece, winner of the Orange Prize for Fiction, is a novel about Africa in a wider sense: about the end of colonialism, ethnic allegiances, class and race - and about the ways in which love can complicate all of these things.

Book Review: 12 Years a Slave by Solomon Northup

I received an advance reader copy of this book from Story Cartel in exchange for an honest review.

Publisher: Story Cartel Classics

Pages: 256

Rating: 4/5

Goodreads Page

Amazon.com

Summary (from Goodreads)

This is the true story of Solomon Northup, who was born and raised as a freeman in New York. He lived the American dream, with a house and a loving family - a wife and two kids. Then one day he was drugged, kidnapped, and sold into slavery in the deep south. These are the true accounts of his twelve hard years as a slave.

Book Review: The Golden Cage. Three Brothers, Three Choices, One Destiny by Shirin Ebadi

Format I Read/Publisher: Paperback, Rizzoli

Pages: 253

Rating: 5/5

Goodreads page

Summary

Conceived as a monument to all the victims of Iran's Islamic Revolution, The Golden Cage follows the lives of Shirin Ebadi's childhood friend Pari and her three brothers, as each of them subscribes to one of the different ideologies tearing the country - and their family - apart.