The author of Purple Hibiscus, Chiamamanda Ngozi Adichie wrote a novel about the Biafran War as her second novel. If you are interested in reading some reviews of the book, check out the official website for the book.
About the book:
" Half of a Yellow Sun recreates a seminal moment in modern African history: Biafra's impassioned struggle to establish an independent republic in Nigeria, and the chilling violence that followed.
With astonishing empathy and the effortless grace of a natural storyteller, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie weaves together the lives of three characters swept up in the turbulence of the decade. Thirteen-year-old Ugwu is employed as a houseboy for a university professor full of revolutionary zeal. Olanna is the professor's beautiful mistress, who has abandoned her life of privilege in Lagos for a dusty university town and the charisma of her new lover. And Richard is a shy young Englishman in thrall to Olanna's twin sister, an enigmatic figure who refuses to belong to anyone. As Nigerian troops advance and they must run for their lives, their ideals are severely tested, as are their loyalties to one another.
Epic, ambitious, and triumphantly realized, Half of a Yellow Sun is a remarkable novel about moral responsibility, about the end of colonialism, about ethnic allegiances, about class and race—and the ways in which love can complicate them all.
About the Author:Adichie grew up in Nigeria, went to college in the United States, and is pursuing graduate work at Yale. To read more about her, check out the website above.
About our discussion
One of the things that really struck our group about this book was the way that Adichie really brings the reader into a world that seems very real: the way the characters speak, what they eat, the sights, sounds, smells of their world surrounded us as we read.
The book also brought us to ask why and how group differences in a society can turn into motives for violence and hatred, and what the role of outsiders should or can be in such a conflict. We were reading about a conflict that resulted in great suffering for civilians, a conflict that was inside a country's borders, a conflict in which natural resources played a significant role, in which the use of child soldiers was evident, a conflict that clearly illustrated how easy it is for human rights to be abused in an environment of political upheaval, violence, and internal displacement.
The remarkable thing is that this conflict happened in 1967-70, yet it has a lot of parallels to current conflicts! There is a lot we can learn from history, and this piece of fiction really drew us into that world, and made us care about the people who lived in it.
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