New Arrivals: Award-Winning Adichie’s Books

Monday, July 26, 2010

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is an acclaimed Nigerian writer whose first two novels won literary awards. Adichie had her first novel published in 2003. It received excellent reviews and won a literary award for first book. Her second novel won the 2007 Orange Prize for fiction.

Purple Hibiscus RRP: RM49.90 Price: RM17.90
From the outside, fifteen-year-old Kambili has the perfect life. She lives in a beautiful house, has a caring family, and attends an exclusive missionary school. She’s completely shielded from the troubles of the world. Yet, as Kambili reveals in her tender-voiced account, things are less than perfect in her wealthy Nigerian home. Although her papa is generous and well respected, he is fanatically religious and tyrannical at home. But everything changes once Kambili and Jaja visit Aunty Ifeoma outside the city. For the first time they experience freedom from their papa. Jaja learns to garden and work with his hands, and Kambili secretly falls in love with a young, charismatic priest. Purple Hibiscus is a stunning debut that captures the fragile beauty of a young woman’s awakening at a time when both country and family are on the cusp of change.

This first novel is about the promise of freedom; about the blurred lines between the old gods and the new; between childhood and adulthood; between love and hatred. An extraordinary debut, Purple Hibiscus is a compelling novel which captures both a country and an adolescence at a time of tremendous change.

Thing Around Your Neck RRP: RM35.90 Price: RM17.90
The words “Things Fall Apart” are so frequently associated with Nigerian author Chinua Achebe’s 1958 novel that it is easy forget they are not original to it but taken from Yeats’s 1920 poem “The Second Coming.” In her most intimate and seamlessly crafted work to date, award-winning author Adichie turns her penetrating eye not only on Nigeria but on America as well, in 12 dazzling stories that explore the ties that bind men and women, parents and children, Africa and the U.S.

Half Of A Yellow Sun RRP: RM49.90 Price: RM17.90
With effortless grace, celebrated author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie illuminates a seminal moment in modern African history: Biafra’s impassioned struggle to establish an independent republic in southeastern Nigeria during the late 1960s. We experience this tumultuous decade alongside five unforgettable characters: Ugwu, a thirteen-year-old houseboy who works for Odenigbo, a university professor full of revolutionary zeal; Olanna, the professor’s beautiful young mistress who has abandoned her life in Lagos for a dusty town and her lover’s charm; and Richard, a shy young Englishman infatuated with Olanna’s willful twin sister Kainene. Half of a Yellow Sun is a tremendously evocative novel of the promise, hope, and disappointment of the Biafran war.