Africa’s best literary flower

It is this historical tapestry of a violent past that Adichie employs to gain a sympathetic leverage to embroider the present. Half of a Yellow Sun revolves around a radical academic, his beautiful lover, physically and temperamentally divergent twin sisters, a house boy (who is the soul of the novel) and how they got swept up in the horrors of the Biafra War in which Adichie’s parent’s “lost everything”.

On why she wrote it, she told Charlie Kimber in 2006 that it was “because I lost both grandfathers in the war, because the war changed the cause of Igbo history. I grew up in the shadow of Biafra, which is a subject we are not honest about, don’t want to talk about. But what was most important to me was emotional truth. I wanted this to be a book about human beings, not faceless political events.”

It is this generational distance and familial obsession that laces Half of a Yellow Sun with a tag of detachment and intimacy. And with such a pithy, literary punch. Adichie took four years to write it, and kept the early draft “because (Kenyan writer) Binyavanga Wainaina tells me when I’m 60, it could be worth something”.

Though she’s found success in novels (she won the lucrative MacArthur Fellowship and thus can write full time), Adichie confesses that short stories are her forte.

And The Thing Around Your Neck, a mixture of snapshots of Nigerian life but largely set in America, is one such result. Sad thing is, “that thing round your neck” isn’t a necklace, but the suffocating loneliness the woman feels at night. Chimamanda was once asked how it was like being Adichie. She had no answer... “because I am just me!”