Half of a Yellow Sun

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, 30, is black, she’s a woman and she’s Nigerian. But first and foremost, she is a writer. This is only her second novel but she carries it off with the confidence and accomplishment of one beyond her years and experience.

Nigerian novelist poet ( and author of Things Fall Apart ) Chinua Achebe is her hero but I imagine he is now her number one fan.

Set in the 1960s, beginning on the cusp of the Biafran War it tells the interweaving stories of beautiful, educated middle-class Olanna, her feisty sister Kainene, and the disarmingly endearing and ambitious houseboy Ugwu.

Kainene, in fact, is not one of the main three narrators - her lover Richard Churchill is the third - however Adichie’s young women are so vividly portrayed she positively jostles for attention against the (deliberately) insipid Churchill. In fact she may well be the best character with her wry comments and acerbic, resigned views on the state of her country.

For Nigeria is a country which by rights should be as rich and developed as Dubai but as this story shows, the tribalism (fired by British interests), hunger for power, and rampant corruption which riddles every sector of government (and trickles down into society) has been - and continues to be - its downfall.

Politics aside, this is a very rich and real portrait of human nature. In the great tradition of writers as diverse as Tolstoy and Garcia Marquez, Adichie draws out the psychological dramas and struggles which are inevitably manifested and magnified under the pressures of wartime.

Olanna’s husband Odenigbo is the idealistic, unwavering socialist who remains optimistic until his mother is killed during a Nigerian army raid, an event which opens his eyes to the fragile reality of his situation

Adichie’s descriptions of the atrocities of war are genuinely harrowing and written with a stark eloquence that avoids an unnecessary shock factor.

The book leaps between the late sixties and the early sixties, a device which ensures a good few surprises based upon the certitude that the reader will be forced to make assumptions about the ensuing relationships between the characters. At times, it can be confusing but it only serves to emphasise the passing of time and the speed with which changes take place.

I actually couldn’t bring myself to finish this book – it’s one of those where the characters become your friends and you can’t bear to let go of them.

A novel with heart and soul.

Claire Storrow