The 100 best books of the 21st century / No 10 / Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

 

The 100 best books of the 21st century

No 10

Half of a Yellow Sun

by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (2006)

The Master and his houseboy

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie brings a lucid intelligence and compassion to the painful history of Biafra in Half of a Yellow Sun, says Maya Jaggi

Maya Jaggi

Saturday 19 Augus 2006

Half of a Yellow Sun
by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
391pp, Fourth Estate, £14.99

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's luminous and formidable talent was first seen in Purple Hibiscus, her 2004 novel about a childhood devastated by a religious patriarch, which won a Commonwealth writers' prize and was shortlisted for the Orange prize. Her second novel, Half of a Yellow Sun, takes its title from the emblem for Biafra, the breakaway state in eastern Nigeria that survived for only three years, and whose name became a global byword for war by starvation. Adichie's powerful focus on war's impact on civilian life, and the trauma beyond the trenches, earns this novel a place alongside such works as Pat Barker's Regeneration trilogy and Helen Dunmore's depiction of the Leningrad blockade, The Siege.

Juan Goytisolo / Scourge of the new Spain

Juan Goytisolo
Poster by T.A.

Juan Goytisolo

Scourge of the new Spain

Maya JaggiSaturday 12 August 2000 23.56 BST

Juan Goytisolo was married but took male lovers, and fled bourgeois Barcelona for the Islamic world, which inspired him to launch attacks on the intolerance of his native land. Maya Jaggi on Spain's greatest living writer - and its harshest critic

When the Spanish dictator Franco died 25 years ago, Juan Goytisolo felt liberated. "I discovered that my real, tyrannical father was Franco," he says, "my mother was killed by his bombs, my family destroyed, and he forced me to become an exile. Everything I created was a result of the civil war."