"The world was silent when we died."This casual statement he once heard is used as the title of a book written by one of the characters in this novel, in which Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie chronicles the birth, short and tortured life and death of the State of Biafra: born on the 30th of May, 1967 from Nigeria and forcefully annexed back by the parent state, after a bitter war in which a million died, in January 1970.Most of us, I suspect, do not know about this short-lived country. Even Wikipedia c...

Ugwu is a houseboy for his 'Master' intellectual Odenigbo who's dating upper middle-class Olanna. Olanna has a non-identical twin, the unstoppable Kainene, who is seeing an Englishman, Richard. This is the story of these five peoples' lives in 1960s Nigeria, from post-Colonial optimism through to the end of the Biafran war. And here's a spoiler... this book is brilliant!Adichie perfectly captures post-Colonial Nigeria in the first third of the book, managing to cover not only Lagos, but Igbo-cen...

When Nigeria gained its independence from Britain in 1960, it stood to be one of the most prosperous, productive, and influential nations on the continent. Rich with natural resources, including vast reserves of oil, it possessed an educated middle class and a cultural life that blended multiple ethnic groups, languages and religions in a vast and vibrant collective. Like many African nations colonized by Europeans, its borders had been drawn with little regard for political and cultural realiti...

Beautifully written but it didn't speak to me like Purple Hibiscus. At times I found it to be too long and at others I couldn't connect to the characters.

For my review, I have selected a poem featured very near the end of this devastatingly real and haunting novel. Written by the character Okeoma who apparently is based on the real poet Christopher Okigbo.The World Was Silent When We DiedDid you see photos in sixty-eightOf Children with their hair becoming rust:Sickly patches nestled on those small heads,Then falling off, like rotten leaves on dust?Imagine children with arms like toothpicks,With footballs for bellies and skin stretched thin.It wa...

Women’s Prize for Fiction 2007Women’s Prize for Fiction, Winner of Winners 2020I loved Americanah. A favorite of mine. Half of A Yellow Sun is a wonderful historical fiction about the war between Nigeria and Biafra. So much sorrow. What I liked most about this book was the twin sisters. The author portrayed them so well.Certainly a book we should all read.4.5 out of 5 stars

She unfurled Odenigbo's cloth flag and told them what the symbols meant. Red was the blood of the siblings massacred in the North, black was for mourning them, green was for the prosperity Biafra would have, and, finally, the half of a yellow sun stood for the glorious future. I'm so conflicted about this book which I desperately wanted to love: it's an important story and one that, as Adichie herself says, needs to be told by an African writer - (view spoiler)[that was a neat trick to have R

It came to me as an epiphany as I barreled through the last few pages of this book, blanketed in my Sunday evening lethargy, marveling at Adichie's graceful evocation of a forgotten time and place and feeling the embarrassment of having known nothing about the Biafran war, that somewhere in the Gaza strip the maimed bodies of children must lie strewn amidst the debris of their former lives while vicious debates rage on twitter in which people pick a side - Israel or Hamas - to defend from critic...

Magic. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (born 1977) seemed to possess a magic wand that she was able to weave a story that was not supposed to be interesting for me: an Asian who have not been to Africa except seeing parts of that continent in the movies and reading Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart. Adichie turned an “uninteresting” story that speaks lucidly, bravely and beautifully about that tumultuous event that happened in her country Nigeria during the latter part of the 60’s when she was not even...

I read only about one-third of this novel. Adichie's (CNA) writing doesn't agree with me at all. And the characters are so flat they should be able to slide under a door trouble-free. The characters don't even bother to play their role with its limited definition. Instead they keep pounding their fists on a table and shouting out what their role is supposed to be: "I am a sardonic bitch.", "I am sooo non-racist you won't even believe it", "blah blah".Ouch! My head hurts.One type of characters I

November 2020 update: Winner of Winners of Women's Prize for Fiction, meaning the best book voted by the readers from all the previous winners. I think it is well deserved. From this book you learn that the European powers did a shitty job when they created the African countries, not taking in consideration any cultural/tribe aspects. Lots of problems resulted from that, especially war. (Read 2013)

A few months ago I read Chinua Achebe’s autobiography, “There Was a Country”, which depicted Nigeria’s Biafran War (1967-1970). This book also deals with the events before and leading up to the war. This book was marvelous. The story just flows for the most part and the language used is so evocative. I’m sure people who have visited or lived in Africa will appreciate the descriptions of African life, African mentality, humour, nature and so on. I have to admit, I much preferred the first half to...

(Throwback Review) This novel tells us the story of Biafra's quest for an independent republic in Nigeria. This novel, set in the 1960s, tells us the racist impact colonialism had inflicted on Africa. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is one of my most favorite contemporary African writers. The story is told through five main characters Ugwu, Olanna, Richard, Odenigbo, and Kainene. This is a riveting, evocative novel, just like all the other novels written by the author. "The real tragedy of our

SurvivalThe story of the independence movement for the Biafra region of Nigeria was momentous, and in modern times we would have been much more capable of responding in awareness and support. I remember as a child in an Irish school donating weekly to help the starving people in Biafra without really understanding what was happening.This story takes the factual situation of the Igbo people in their attempt to establish the Republic of Biafra from Nigeria in 1967 and adds fictional characters and...