I remember seeing the images from Biafra when I was a child growing up in Yorkshire. Those terrible images of starving and dying children, with swollen bellies and enormous eyes in heads that looked too big for their small, frail bodies. Reading this book brought those images back to me and helped me understand the conflict that took place in East Nigeria in the 1960's, in a way I couldn't understand when a child.
Please don't be put off reading this book by the above paragraph. I must say it is one of the best books I have read, and although it is extremely sad in parts, it is also very funny and entertaining, and gives a superb insight into Igbo culture.
Three people's lives intertwine - Ugwu, the village boy who comes to work as houseboy for a university lecturer; Olanna, the young woman from Lagos who leaves her privileged life to live with the same lecturer, and Richard, a white Englishman who absorbs himself in Igbo culture and who enters a relationship with Olanna's twin sister.
This book is also about the wider African culture and beliefs, about moral responsibility, about the end of colonialism, about ethnic and tribal allegiances, about class and race. It is also a story of love and how this can complicate things.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adiche also authored "Purple Hibiscus", another superb read. You can find both these books in the Fiction section of the Library.
Sandra Firth
