Half of a Yellow Sun

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.