Half of a Yellow Sun

Half of a Yellow Sun

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Literature & Fiction

With her award-winning debut novel, Purple Hibiscus, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie was heralded by the Washington Post Book World as the “21st century daughter” of Chinua Achebe. Now, in her masterly, haunting new novel, she recreates a seminal moment in modern African history: Biafra’s impassioned struggle to establish an independent republic in Nigeria during the 1960s. With the effortless grace of a natural storyteller, Adichie weaves together the lives of five characters caught up in the extraordinary tumult of the decade. Fifteen-year-old Ugwu is houseboy to Odenigbo, a university professor who sends him to school, and in whose living room Ugwu hears voices full of revolutionary zeal. Odenigbo’s beautiful mistress, Olanna, a sociology teacher, is running away from her parents’ world of wealth and excess; Kainene, her urbane twin, is taking over their father’s business; and Kainene’s English lover, Richard, forms a bridge between their two worlds. As we follow these intertwined lives through a military coup, the Biafran secession and the subsequent war, Adichie brilliantly evokes the promise, and intimately, the devastating disappointments that marked this time and place. Epic, ambitious and triumphantly realized, Half of a Yellow Sun is a more powerful, dramatic and intensely emotional picture of modern Africa than any we have had before. From the Hardcover edition.
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Purple Hibiscus

Purple Hibiscus

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Literature & Fiction

An alternate cover edition for the ISBN can be found here. The limits of fifteen-year-old Kambili’s world are defined by the high walls of her family estate and the dictates of her fanatically religious father. Her life is regulated by schedules: prayer, sleep, study, prayer. When Nigeria is shaken by a military coup, Kambili’s father, involved mysteriously in the political crisis, sends her to live with her aunt. In this house, noisy and full of laughter, she discovers life and love – and a terrible, bruising secret deep within her family. This extraordinary debut novel from Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, author of ‘Half of a Yellow Sun’, is about the blurred lines between the old gods and the new, childhood and adulthood, love and hatred – the grey spaces in which truths are revealed and real life is lived.
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Dear Ijeawele, or a Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions

Dear Ijeawele, or a Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Literature & Fiction

From the best-selling author of Americanah and We Should All Be Feminists comes a powerful new statement about feminism today--written as a letter to a friend. A few years ago, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie received a letter from a dear friend from childhood, asking her how to raise her baby girl as a feminist. Dear Ijeawele is Adichie's letter of response. Here are fifteen invaluable suggestions--compelling, direct, wryly funny, and perceptive--for how to empower a daughter to become a strong, independent woman. From encouraging her to choose a helicopter, and not only a doll, as a toy if she so desires; having open conversations with her about clothes, makeup, and sexuality; debunking the myth that women are somehow biologically arranged to be in the kitchen making dinner, and that men can "allow" women to have full careers, Dear Ijeawele goes right to the heart of sexual politics in the twenty-first century. It will start a new and urgently needed conversation about what it really means to be a woman today.
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We Should All Be Feminists

We Should All Be Feminists

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Literature & Fiction

An eBook short. What does “feminism” mean today? That is the question at the heart of We Should All Be Feminists, a personal, eloquently-argued essay—adapted from her much-viewed Tedx talk of the same name—by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, the award-winning author of Americanah and Half of a Yellow Sun. With humor and levity, here Adichie offers readers a unique definition of feminism for the twenty-first century—one rooted in inclusion and awareness. She shines a light not only on blatant discrimination, but also the more insidious, institutional behaviors that marginalize women around the world, in order to help readers of all walks of life better understand the often masked realities of sexual politics. Throughout, she draws extensively on her own experiences—in the U.S., in her native Nigeria, and abroad—offering an artfully nuanced explanation of why the gender divide is harmful for women and men, alike. Argued in the same observant, witty and clever prose that has made Adichie a bestselling novelist, here is one remarkable author’s exploration of what it means to be a woman today—and an of-the-moment rallying cry for why we should all be feminists.
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The Shivering (A Vintage Short)

The Shivering (A Vintage Short)

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Literature & Fiction

A Vintage Shorts “Short Story Month” Selection On the day a plane crashed in Nigeria, Ukamaka lets into her apartment a neighbor in a Princeton sweatshirt she’d never met before to keep her company and pray. United in a common loss, Ukamaka is glad to have someone she can confide in about her home, her ex-boyfriend, her life as a graduate student in the United States, and her ambitions. But, in her eagerness to discover a new friend in Chinedu, Ukamaka is slow to realize the tragic and desperate secrets he is protecting from her.     In this poignant, stirring short depicting the solitary lives that immigrants face in the United States, acclaimed author of Purple Hibiscus and Half of a Yellow Sun Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie celebrates faith and the fragile ties that can grant salvation. An ebook short.
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The Thing Around Your Neck

The Thing Around Your Neck

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Literature & Fiction

From the prizewinning author of Half of a Yellow Sun (“A gorgeous, pitiless account of love, violence, and betrayal”—Time; “Instantly enthralling”—The New York Times) twelve dazzling stories—her most intimate work to date—in which she turns her penetrating eye on the ties that bind men and women, parents and children, Nigeria and the United States. In “A Private Experience,” a medical student hides from a violent riot with a poor Muslim woman whose dignity and faith force her to confront the realities and fears she’s been pushing away. In “Tomorrow Is Too Far,” a woman unlocks the devastating secret that surrounds her brother’s death. The young mother at the center of “Imitation” finds her comfortable life in Philadelphia threatened when she learns that her husband has moved his mistress into their Lagos home. And the title story depicts the choking loneliness of a Nigerian girl who moves to an America that turns out to be nothing like the country she expected; though falling in love brings her desires nearly within reach, a death in her homeland forces her to reexamine them. Searing and profound, suffused with beauty, sorrow, and longing, this collection is a resounding confirmation of Adichie’s prodigious literary powers.
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Americanah

Americanah

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Literature & Fiction

Ifemelu and Obinze are young and in love when they depart military-ruled Nigeria for the West. Beautiful, self-assured Ifemelu heads for America, where despite her academic success, she is forced to grapple with what it means to be black for the first time. Quiet, thoughtful Obinze had hoped to join her, but with post-9/11 America closed to him, he instead plunges into a dangerous, undocumented life in London. Fifteen years later, they reunite in a newly democratic Nigeria, and reignite their passion—for each other and for their homeland. Source: chimamanda.com
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The Shivering

The Shivering

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Literature & Fiction

A Vintage Shorts "Short Story Month" Selection On the day a plane crashed in Nigeria, Ukamaka lets into her apartment a neighbor in a Princeton sweatshirt she'd never met before to keep her company and pray. United in a common loss, Ukamaka is glad to have someone she can confide in about her home, her ex-boyfriend, her life as a graduate student in the United States, and her ambitions. But, in gher eagerness to discover a new friend in Chinedu, Ukamaka is slow to realize the tragic and desperate secrets he is protecting from her. In this poignant, stirring short depicting the solitary lives that immigrants face in the United States, acclaimed author of Purple Hibiscus and Half of a Yellow Sun Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie celebrates faith and the fragile ties that can grant salvation. An ebook short.
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