Review
www.theguardian.com/books/2006/aug/19/fiction.shopping2
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.
Adichie takes her time in reaching the privations of war. Covering the decade to the end of the Nigeria-Biafra war of 1967-70, the novel first develops its characters in a period of peace and - for some - plenty after Nigerian independence in 1960. Among the protagonists are Odenigbo, or "the Master", a radical maths lecturer at the University of Nsukka - in what became the secessionist Igbo land - and Ugwu, the village teenager who becomes his houseboy, but whom he enrolls at the university staff school. A novel that descends into dire hunger begins with Ugwu's devoted creativity in the kitchen, confecting pepper soup, spicy jollof rice and chicken boiled in herbs. Beer and brandy flow as he serves the Master's friends while absorbing snippets of intellectual debate in the era of Sharpeville, de Gaulle in Algeria and the struggle for US civil rights.
Alongside reading the novel, do try to watch the very interesting film adaptation: www.amazon.co.uk/Half-Yellow-Sun-Thandie-Newton/dp/B08D6YFHZ2/ref=sr_1_2?crid=PCL6WH4FAV3D&dchild=1&keywords=half+of+a+yellow+sun&qid=1621254557&sprefix=half+of+a+yell%2Caps%2C184&sr=8-2