Half of a Yellow Sun

Nigeria undergoes a revolutionary schism and the republic of Biafra is created. This books tells the story of Biafra through the lens of a group of unlikely companions; the house-boy, the professor's mistress, and the Englishman who turns his back on the colonisers but will never fully understand Africa. I never quite got into this, I felt it wanted to teach the reader, more than tell a story. Maybe I'm just an Englishman who will never fully understand Africa, though.

4.5 stars. Everyone told me this book would wreck me, and it did, but not in an obvious tearjerker way. Half of a Yellow Sun starts with the mundane but swells into action with uprisings, war, and turmoil that affects the characters you've developed attachments to during the mundane chapters. The book has a cinematic quality to it that makes sense, knowing it was later adapted for film.

This book is about the unsuccessful rebellion of Igbo community against the Nigerians which lasted 3 years.
The book is told through the experiences of several character on how the war affected their life and made it difficult.
It is such an eye opener to know about the Biafra war which was ignored by many countries and failed to recognise the condition of civilians who struggled to carry on.

Like others have said, I'm glad I read this and I will probably never read it again. It's a fictional account of fictional residents of Nigeria/Biafra before, during, and after the civil war in the late '60s. It's not a war I even knew had occurred for a long time – as you might expect, it's not the war that gets top billing in American textbooks covering that era. As a consequence of my ignorance, I can't speak to its historical accuracy, although a cursory skim of Wikipedia turns up nothing to complain about.

Writing-wise, there are some superb passages, and some that tell too much rather than showing. I noticed the latter less as the book went on.

This is a rough read, not because it's dense (though it is well over 500 pages) but because it's depressing. The war was notorious for the starvation of much of what was then Biafra, and developed in part from the factionalism resultant from the colonially-imposed unification of different people into a single country. I don't pretend to be an expert, and I wouldn't mind learning more about it.

Fascinating book that made me sad, which is part of why it took me so long to get through it after my initial fast start – it's hard to want to pick up an upsetting book once you've put it down.

Okay, don't shoot me. I see a lot of people like this book and I totally get why! There's a lot to like here! The writing style is great, the depictions are vivid, and the author really knows how to paint a scene. I really felt like I got into the heads of the characters, their motives, and their feelings. The audiobook narrator was also really, really good.

But I just didn't find a lot here that I found interesting. The setting was unique, the culture fascinating, but I thought the start was really slow, and honestly I found the characters kind of boring. Ugwu was especially unlikeable to me. I don't know, I see why a lot of people like this book, but it just wasn't for me.

I was affected more by the large-scale tragedy than by any of the personal suffering of the main characters. The final personal loss did not hit me very hard because I was already numbed by the descriptions of the horrors happening to secondary and background characters, like the beheaded servant, or the malnourished children.

Throughout, I had the sense that the main characters were a bit contrived to be in an optimal position to cover all aspects of the war. For example, Olanna happens to have an ex from the north, who ends up on the opposite side of the war.

The Part 3 section was particularly jarring, an extended flashback focusing on soap opera-like subplots, which interrupts the story of the war.

All in all, despite the flaws in characterization, it was still a powerful account of a period of history that I was ignorant about.

I went in completely blind, knowing that I absolutely loved Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Americanah which, along with Half of a Yellow Sun, recently made the top 20 for BBC Culture's Greatest novels of the 21st century.

It's gut wrenching historical fiction. Outlining the Biafran struggle for independence from Nigeria filtered through the lens of a small affluent Nigerian family. Adichie manages to balance the horrors of war with smaller family dramas without allowing either to become overwrought and melodramatic. Through the course of the book she will somehow manage to touch on colonialism, propaganda, child soldiers, aid efforts, Western media coverage, tribal superstition, famine and grief. It's appears effortless and natural.

What is incredible is the story of Nigeria and how a book can bring that place to life. Well duh, but I've never really considered it before, reading mostly Western works. It's got me thinking of tackling more international writers.

This was a historical fiction book about the Nigerian Civil War that took place in the 1960s. It covers 5 viewpoints - upper-class twin sisters, a professor, a boy from a village and a British journalist - and the relationships they share with each other. Obviously as a wartime story it's very gripping and can be quite sad to read, but there was also drama just in the interpersonal relationships between the main characters as well. Going into the book I knew absolutely nothing about the war, so it was really nice to be able to enjoy reading a book plus learn something new at the same time!