CHIMAMANDA NGOZI ADICHIE (b.1977)
Half of a Yellow Sun. London: Fourth Estate, 2006.
‘It is, of course, fiction. But it is also […] a record of lived experience’: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie invites the reader behind her searing portrait of Nigeria’s Civil War, explaining its personal resonance and wider historical significance in more than 1,000 words of commentary across 54 pages. This copy of the first edition, signed and with a self-portrait by the author in pen (‘Contemplating’), is furnished with a wealth of personal anecdote relating the events in the book to her family’s experiences of 1960s Nigeria and the Biafran War, and historical fact; slices of character insight; and moments of self-reflection, both in terms of the writing itself and Adichie’s feelings about her second novel, including the many times it brought her to tears. Voted the Women’s prize for fiction ‘winner of winners’ in 2020, it was adapted for film in 2013, in a production starring Chiwetel Ejiofor and Thandiwe Newton.

Octavo. Original red cloth, black lettering to spine, pictorial dust jacket (edges slightly bumped).