He owns several factories and publishes the pro-democracy newspaper the Standard. Kambili then explains the events leading up to Palm Sunday, detailing the seeds of rebellion that are planted in the children’s minds by their liberal Aunty Ifeoma, Papa’s sister. This defiant act and resulting violence marks the beginning of the end of the Achike family. The book hits a shelf containing his wife’s beloved figurines. Because Jaja has no reasonable excuse for missing church, Papa throws his missal at his son. Jaja has refused to go to church and receive communion. He punishes his wife, Mama (Beatrice Achike), and his children when they fail to live up to his impossibly high standards. Kambili’s father, Papa (Eugene Achike) is a strict authoritarian whose strict adherence to Catholicism overshadows his paternal love.

Kambili lives with her older brother Jaja (Chukwuku Achike), a teenager who, like his sister, excels at school but is withdrawn and sullen. She divides her life between the United States and Nigeria.Purple Hibiscus takes place in Enugu, a city in post-colonial Nigeria, and is narrated by the main character, Kambili Achike. In 2009 Chimamanda Ngozie Adichie published her collected short stories, The Thing Around Your Neck set in America and Nigeria, and in 2013 she published her third novel Americanah which is about race and identity.Īmericanah was well received and was shortlisted for the Bailey’s Women’s Fiction Prize and won the US’s National Book Critics Circle Award: Fiction category. Half of Yellow Sun was adapted by Biye Bandele for the cinema and stars Chiwetel Ejiofor and Thandie Newton. The novel’s searing treatment of the Biafran War saw Chimamanda Ngozie Adichie compared to, among others, Chinua Achebe, Ken Saro-Wiwa and Helon Habila. The lives of these three collide in unexpected ways as serious questions of ethnicity, politics and history play out. Ugwu his houseboy, Olanna the professor’s girlfriend, and Richard an English writer.

It centres on a professor, Odenigbo, and three characters who lie in his orbit. Half of a Yellow Sun is set against the backdrop of the Biafran War, Nigeria’s bloody civil war fought from 1967 – 1970. It went on to win several awards including the Orange Prize for fiction. Purple Hibiscus was shortlisted for the Orange Prize and won the Commonwealth Writer’s Prize in 2005.įurther critical acclaim came with the publication of her second novel, Half of a Yellow Sun which was heralded almost immediately as a masterpiece. Set in Nigeria where she grew up, her debut is told through the eyes of a fifteen year old girl who is facing the challenges of living under the rule of her fanatically religious father and an oppressive state.

Adichie purple hibiscus