Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's luminous and formidable talent was first seen in Purple Hibiscus, her 2004 novel about a childhood devastated by a religious patriarch, which won a Commonwealth writers' prize and was shortlisted for the Orange prize. Her second novel, Half of a Yellow Sun, takes its title from the emblem for Biafra, the breakaway state in eastern Nigeria that survived for only three years, and whose name became a global byword for war by starvation. Adichie's powerful focus on war's impact on civilian life, and the trauma beyond the trenches, earns this novel a place alongside such works as Pat Barker's Regeneration trilogy and Helen Dunmore's depiction of the Leningrad blockade, The Siege.