Amazon Synopsis
The sweeping novel from the author of 'Purple Hibiscus', shortlisted for the Orange Prize, and winner of the Commonwealth Writers Award. This highly anticipated novel from Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is set in Nigeria during the 1960s, at the time of a vicious civil war in which a million people died and thousands were massacred in cold blood. The three main characters in the novel are swept up in the violence during these turbulent years. One is a young boy from a poor village who is employed at a university lecturer's house. The other is a young middle-class woman, Olanna, who has to confront the reality of the massacre of her relatives. And the third is a white man, a writer who lives in Nigeria for no clear reason, and who falls in love with Olanna's twin sister, a remote and enigmatic character. As these people's lives intersect, they have to question their own responses to the unfolding political events. This extraordinary novel is about Africa in a wider sense: about moral responsibility, about the end of colonialism, about ethnic allegiances, about class and race; and about the ways in which love can complicate all of these things.

If this is your introduction to Bookcrossing, welcome!

Please make as many, or few, comments about the book as you wish. The book is now yours to do with as you choose. Keep it, pass it on, but please leave the label, so we can keep in touch with what's happened to it.

If you would like to know what happens to the book if you decide to pass it on, then do join BookCrossing. It's free, private and it's great fun!

a good read, but not an easy one

in the cafe bookcase

I took this home because I've never read a bad book by a Nigerian.

Well, the search for a bad Nigerian novel goes on. I already avoid mentioning the Russians when discussing literature with foreigners as it's so easy to find yourself admitting that the English might not be the world champions of the form. If you mention Charlotte Brontë they just pretend they've never heard of her. I'm worried that I may have to place us in third behind Nigeria.

So, faults first. She's occasionally telly not showy. She's prone to the occasional adverb or modifier-heavy noun phrase. Some of the narration and dialogue in the early chapters is a forced stilt march.

None of these criticisms apply to Ugwu's chapters which are consistently brilliant. What she's particularly good at is creating believable and interesting characters, spooling out the soap opera of their lives and then dumping them into extraordinary events. She's also not without humour. I liked poor English Richard who has to apologise after sex and who carries on shaving when the shelling begins.

On the shelf with the other books.