Excerpted from the full review:

"Half of a Yellow Sun is a meeting place for stories, told by three vastly different, irrevocably connected characters. Ugwu, a precocious boy from an impoverished village, is sent to tend house for the eccentric, eloquent Odenigbo, a lecturer at Nigeria’s Nsukka University. Overcome by the incredible improvement in his living situation, Ugwu becomes quickly devoted to pleasing his ‘Master’, as he insists on referring to the enigmatic lecturer and fervent anti-establishment nationalist. It is not long before the distractingly beautiful Olanna, the daughter of a wealthy, influential Lagos statesman, eschews her pampered circumstances to move in with her lover Odenigbo. Olanna’s gentle compassion towards Ugwu endears him to her, as simultaneously, her potent sensuality leaves the boy achingly aware of her allure. Neither is Olanna’s sensuality lost on Richard, a sensitive, thoughtful British national, who falls quickly under the spell of Olanna’s acerbically witty, less comely twin sister, Kainene.

The novel is about the marriage of circumstance and coincidence that envelops these five, set against the backdrop of the 1967-1970 Nigerian-Biafran War.

Wait. Do you think, as you open the first pages of this, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s sophomore novel, that you’re in for a torrid, sexy drama-romance lightly pedestalled atop an intriguing war-torn background? The novel’s background is its foreground. This novel’s setting is immediate… it is pertinent, at all times, to the concerns of the book, to its intertwining themes of love, loss, betrayal and survival."

You can continue reading my full review of Half of a Yellow Sun at Novel Niche.