My latest review is now up at Shiny New Books, covering the Folio Society edition of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s monumental novel about the Nigeria-Biafra civil war.
“The people who offer us the best insights into reality are often novelists,” Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has said, [The Guardian, 14 Jan 2020] and reading Adichie’s own novel Half of a Yellow Sun puts that statement to the test. Can reading a novel about one of the twentieth century’s innumerable conflicts, the Nigerian-Biafran civil war of 1967 to 1970, truly bring us into the reality of that complex affair, in a way that makes it meaningful and present to us today?
Adichie does it by engaging a circle of characters through whose eyes we see the action, making us care about them and their fate, which does not mean merely physical survival, but their emotional and relational well-being too.
