Fifty years after the end of the Nigerian-Biafran war, we´re going to read this modern classic about the conflictOn 15 January 1970, the Nigerian-Biafran war ended. Over two and a half years, there had been more than 100,000 military casualties, with between 500,000 and two million civilians either murdered or dead from starvation. It was a war that involved France, Israel, the Soviet Union and Britain. It was fought over the kind of ethnic and religious tensions that still divide so many of us today, alongside, inevitably, oil. It was a cataclysmic tragedy. And yet, as Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie says, it is a conflict that `we seem determined to forget.` Which makes it all the more important that we should try to engage with her `way of remembering`, Half Of A Yellow Sun.Published in 2006, when Adichie was not yet 30, this novel is well on the way to classic status. It won the Orange prize for fiction in 2007 and was described by Maya Jaggi here in the Guardian as `a landmark novel` and by Janet Maslin as `enthralling` in the New York Times. It has since sold hundreds of thousands of copies, adapted into a not-entirely-successful film and, just a few weeks ago, made the top 10 in the Guardian´s list of the best books of the 21st century. Continue reading...
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