Set in Nigeria during the decade culminating in the 1967–70 Biafran war, a secession conflict that left more than a million dead from violence and famine, this story is at once a historical drama and a tale of family struggles and romances gone right and wrong. Half of a Yellow Sun established Adichie, who hadn’t been born when the war took place, as one of the most talented young writers of the twenty-first century. She now travels between the United States and Nigeria, and so, one might say, does her work; in both her essays and her fiction, she charts how ordinary lives span continents, carrying their own truths and consequences every measure of the way.