Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

I remember seeing starving Biafran children and babies with protruding stomachs on the television in the early 70s. I was living in a children’s home in Muswell Hill and two friends had come round for tea. We were chatting about the disco the coming Friday and practising the shuffle to Sex Machine by James Brown. Life was fun and we spent most of our time together bent over double, laughing hysterically. But when the horrific aftermath of war suddenly came into the living room I was shocked, first into silence, and then into floods of tears.

Recently, that memory came back when I began reading Half a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. I now have a context to that memory, the history of the Biafran war. Through the medium of television, I saw children much worse off than myself. Possibly for the first time, and I never forgot those children, or the ravages of war and what guns do to innocent victims. 

The novel recreates a seminal moment in modern African history: Biafra’s impassioned struggle to establish an independent republic in Nigeria, and the chilling violence that followed. Everything that happens within Half of a Yellow Sun has a cause, and often someone to blame along with it, with the British and the Hausa earning their fair shares. The reader is reminded that Britain and Russia supplied arms to the Nigerians. Adichie goes back in time through the remembered experience of her parents and family and those that didn’t survive. Beginning with the dedication:

My grandfathers, whom I never knew, Nwoye David Adichie and AroNweke Felix Odigwe, did not survive the war. My grandmothers, Nwabuodu Regina Odigwe and Nwamgbafor Agnes Adichie, remarkable women both, did. This book is dedicated to their memories: ka fa nodu na ndokwa. And to Mellitus, wherever he may be.

Mellitus, was Adichi’s parents’ houseboy during the war. She brings Mellitus back to life and tells his story, giving his memory a voice. Half of a Yellow Sun, is Adichie’s second novel and received the 2007 Orange Prize for Fiction. It takes its title from the flag for Biafra.

Red was the blood of the sibling massacred in the North, back was for mourning them, green was for the prosperity Biafra would have, and, finally, the half of a yellow sun stood for the glorious future.

The novel opens before the war, shortly after Nigeria wins independence from the UK, when middle-class life at Nsukka University is rich in food, booze, revolutionary rhetoric and hope. Ugwu, an Igbo boy from a bush village, goes to Nsukka to work as a houseboy for Odenigbo, a professor and radical.

Master was a little crazy; he had spent too many years reading books overseas, talked to himself in his office, did not always return greets, and had too much hair. Ugwu’s aunty said this in low voice as they walked on the path. ‘But he is a good man,’ she added. ‘And as long as you work well, you will eat well. You will even eat meat every day.’ She stopped to spit; the saliva left her mouth with a sucking sound and landed on the grass.

The book is written in four parts. Part One: The Early Sixties; Part Two: The Late Sixties; Part Three: The Early Sixties; and Part Four: The Late Sixties.

The narrative focus shifts between various characters attached to the university: Ugwu, Odenigbo, his beautiful girlfriend Olanna, and Richard, an English ex-pat who falls in love with Nigerian art and then Olanna's twin sister.

‘Nigerian food is quite all right, Harrison,’ Richard said. If only Harrison knew how much he had disliked the food of his childhood, the sharp-tasting kippers full of bones, the porridge with the appalling thick skin on top like a waterproof lining, the overcooked roast beef with fat around the edges drenched in gravy.

Food at the beginning of the book represents the affluence of their lifestyles, there is plenty of it, an abundance. As the circumstances change, so too does the food.

Nsukka University is evacuated, and Olanna, Odenigbo, Ugwu, and Baby move to the cities of Abba and then Umuahia. Their living situations get progressively worse as the war continues and Biafra’s food and money runs out.

Olanna glanced at the clutter that was their room and home – the bed, two yam tubers, and the mattress that leanded against the dirt-smeared wall, the cartons and bags piled in a corner, the kerosene stove that she took to the kitchen only when it was needed – and felt a surge of revulsion, the urge to run and run and run until she was far away from it all.

Food is symbolic of the progress of the war and the situation of the country. As distribution of food ceases and people start to starve, disease follows. Olanna meticulously searches Babie’s head for red hair and compares other children’s bellies to her daughter’s in search for signs of Kwashiorkor, malnutrition caused by lack of protein.

Were you silent when we died?

Did you see photos in sixty-eight 

Of children with their hair becoming rust:

Sickly patches nestled on those small heads,

Then falling off, like rotten leaves on dust?

The reader witnesses the role the media played in distributing images of starving children. “The world was silent when we died”, is a book that sometimes interrupts the narrative. It is being written by an unknown author who describes the larger political forces at work in the war. 

We are led to believe it is Richard writing the book, mainly because he is trying to write one throughout the novel. Adichie is playing with some reader's assumption that it is the white, western male that writes about Africa, rather than say a young, black village boy. She says: “I wanted to make a strongly-felt political point about who should be writing the stories of Africa.”

Half of a Yellow Sun has recently been named the best of the best winner from the last decade of the women’s prize for fiction both by the public and a 10-strong judging panel. Read more here.

I had put off reading Half a Yellow Sun, for quite some time. There were a number of reasons for this. The main one being the memory of the horror in the living room when I was thirteen. However, I was intrigued by Adichie and her stories and I wanted to read and learn more. The final push came a few weeks ago when a few bloggers and writers started tweeting about #DiverseDecember. You can read more about that here.

I found myself totally immersed in the lives of the characters who immediately came to life in my imagination. I understand how the war started, how those babies on the screen back in 1971 came to be there - even though the war had ended in 1970, their starvation continued for some years.

I'm looking forward to joining other writers and readers for #ReadDiverse2016 where I'll not only be reading BAME books, but also other diverse books and in particular books about care leavers who are totally under-represented in UK literature. The literature of the world should (by now) reflect the people of the world.

The Readers of Broken Wheel Recommend - Katarina Bivald

A strange woman is standing on Hope’s main street. ‘Hope’ presumably an optimistic place, but Sara isn’t staying there, only passing through to the aptly named Broken Wheel.

Her hair was a nondescript shade of brown, held back with a carelessly placed hair clip which didn’t stop it flowing down over her shoulders in a tangle of curls. Where her face should have been, there was a copy of Louisa May Alcott’s An Old Fashioned Girl.

The literary allusion to Alcott’s Girl, sees the protagonist, Polly, leave the country to visit her wealthy city friend, Fanny. Sara has left Sweden to visit the USA. There are parallels between the two - though Broken Wheel, is not much more than ‘one big street’ rather than a city. And although initially Polly is rejected by the Fanny’s friends, Sara, is pretty much accepted straightaway.

This is a book about books and clues, clues that are littered throughout the text as the narrator and the town decide how Sara’s literary life will pan out.

Sara is 28, and has never been outside Sweden – except in the (many) books she reads. When her elderly penfriend Amy invites her to come and visit her in Broken Wheel, Iowa, Sara decides it’s time. But when she arrives, there’s a twist waiting for her – Amy has died. Finding herself utterly alone in a dead woman’s house in the middle of nowhere was not the holiday Sara had in mind.

As Sara reflects on how she has used books to hide away from life, she remembers how classmates carved meaningless symbols into desks or on lockers, while:

...she had been a geisha in Japan, walked alongside China’s last empress through the claustrophobic, closed-off rooms of the Forbidden City, grown up with Anne and the others in Green Gables, gone through her fair share of murder, and loved and lost over and over again.

[A few pages later]

Reading books isn't a bad way to live your life, but lately Sara had begun to wonder what kind of life it was, exactly. She had first been struck by this thought when she found out that Josephssons would be closing. It was as though ten years of her life had disappeared along with the bookshop; as though everything she had ever been had only existed on the greyish-white bookshelves of that dusty shop, among the people who bought four-for-three paperbacks in the summer, and anything-at-all-that-was-shiny-and-wrapped-up at Christmas.

Amy accompanies Sara’s narrative journey so the reader gets to see how their relationship evolved. Here in this town so broken it’s almost beyond repair are all the people she’s come to know through Amy’s letters: poor George, fierce Grace, buttoned-up Caroline and Amy’s guarded nephew Tom.

Sara finds herself staying in Amy’s house rent free, a situation she finds intolerable. She tries to find somebody to pay, but nobody wants her money. Money is symbolic, because more than anything, this is a story about community, about being needed and about belonging and that can't be bought.

Sara quickly realises that Broken Wheel is in desperate need of some adventure, a dose of self-help and perhaps a little romance, too.

There was something sad about the town, as though generations of problems and disappointments had rubbed off onto its bricks and its roads…On the other side of the road there was an advert for a pesticide: Control corn root worm! it shouted to the world, two by three metres in size and at least twenty years old.

In short, this was a town in need of a bookshop. And just as there is a romantic interest in Alcott’s Girl, namely Tom, so there is a Tom in Broken Wheel. ’It is a truth universally acknowledged that a Swedish tourist in Iowa must be in want of a man.’ No prizes for guessing the influence of that sentence.

Sara remembers a colleague from the bookshop where she worked in Sweden saying that every story begins with someone arriving somewhere – and this too refers to what this story is, and what it will become. And so as the story weaves its spell, twists, plots and allusions to literary twists, spells and plots, the narrative sometimes acts like a play, complete with stage directions. The townfolk plot and whisper prompts from the sidewings, directing and deciding which shape the story will take.

Caroline closed her eyes. The innocent tone wasn’t fooling her. My goodness, she thought. The woman had barely been in town two days and Jen had already started offering up its young men to her altar. Though, to be fair, it might just as well have been the woman being sacrificed. Like the oaks, the town’s bachelors weren’t exactly a tourist attraction…[Jen’s] gaze was fixed somewhere above Caroline’s head. ‘Don’t you think a holiday romance would be just the thing to get her to enjoy her time here?’ 

The text is littered with foreshadowing and allusions as to how stories work, particularly romance. The Readers of Broken Wheel Recommend is a book about books. All sorts of books, from Little Women and Harry Potter to Jodi Picoult and Jane Austen, from Stieg Larsson to Joyce Carol Oates to Proust. It’s about the joy and pleasure of books, about learning from and escaping into them, and possibly even hiding behind them. It’s about whether or not books are better than real life. For book lovers, this metanarrative is a joy. One that has been expertly handled, for here is a narrator, who like Sara, has spent a huge amount of time with books.

Sara feels she never belonged anywhere – save between the pages of a book – but as she becomes more involved in the town and is embraced by the residents of this far-from-perfect small town, she discovers they need her as much as she needs them.

The Readers of Broken Wheel is a lovely book, and like The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, a joy to read. It is a book that would benefit from more than one reading in order appreciate the complex narrative and literary intertwining. After such an interesting debut book, I wonder if Katarine Bivald's second book will live up to expectations. I hope so, and look forward to her new novel some time in the future.

#ReadDiverse2016

Diversity in publishing has been hitting the headlines recently with a report commissioned by Spread the Word. Back in April 2015, researchers Danuta Kean and Mel Larsen discussed with publishers the key findings of their report: Writing the Future: Black and Asian Authors and Publishers in the UK Market Place.

This has created an ongoing conversation. You can see responses from the media here: The Guardian; Bookseller; Booktrade; The Publishers Association.

A survey of publishers and literary agents indicates that of the respondents over 74 percent of those employed by large publishing houses, and an alarming 97 per cent of agents, believe that the industry is only "a little diverse" or "not diverse at all." After reading these figures, Greenacre Writers decided something had to be done and along with writers and readers, organised a #diverseauthorday. And since then #DiverseDecember and now #ReadDiverse2016 has were launched.

Mslexia books editor Danuta Kean, joined broadcaster Nikki Bedi, book reviewer Naomi Frisby, and author Nikesh Shukla to discuss the report via Fiction Uncovered 2015 as part of a Diversity Panel. You can listen to the programme here.

Naomi Frisby was a guest editor for Fiction Uncovered where she asked: Do you ever reflect on the books you’re choosing to read? Naomi wrote about people with regional accents, the working class, BAME writers, the characters of the circus and the sideshow. 'What they all have in common', said Naomi, 'is that they’re outsiders. They’re not part of the dominant narrative; they exist beyond the mainstream.' You can read more here.

Alex Wheatle is the current guest editor for Fiction Uncovered where he has written The Bard on Hay, about his experience of attending the world famous Hay Festival. A seasoned author, Alex wonders whether he will be accepted by the white majority. He also wonders why more black novelists aren’t invited to Hay. You can read Alex's article here.

As well as Black and Asian authors there has also been a call for more diverse characters such as LGBTQ characters and disabled characters in literature.

More Diverse Conversations:

Kerry Hudson's first novel, Tony Hogan Bought Me An Ice-Cream Float Before He Stole My Ma was published in 2012 by Chatto & Windus and was the winner of the Scottish First Book Award among other awards. Kerry founded The WoMentoring Project and has written for Grazia, Guardian Review and YOU Magazine. On Thursday 9th July, Kerry Hudson presented a rousing provocation to a full house at the National Conversation debate: Lost Stories, Unheard Voices - Diversity in Literature

at Bloomsbury Institute. You can read the presentation here.

Huma Munshi started the #fuckhonour hashtag to express her anger at the oppression women have experienced. She is a writer, poet, blogger and trade unionist. She is a regular contributor to Media Diversified, F-Word and Time to Change. She has written widely on honour based violence, mental health, film and intersectionality. Her weekly column reflects her passion for activism, a feminism that reflects her own experiences as an Asian Muslim woman, film reviews and current affairs. Read more of her articles here.

Susan Barker grew up in east London. She studied philosophy at the University of Leeds and creative writing at the University of Manchester. Her two novels, Sayonara Bar (2005) and The Orientalist and the Ghost (2008), were both longlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize. Her third novel, The Incarnations, will be published in the US on August 18. Susan questions: Should Ethnicity Limit What a Fiction Writer Can Write? Read it here.

Christina Fonthes is a Manchester-based translator, and Afrofeminist blogger. Born in Kinshasa, Congo and raised in London, she is an advocate for LGBTQ (Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender Queer) rights. She recently wrote an article for Media Diversified: Book list for black girls: promoting self-love and empowering young black women. Read it here.

Susan Nussbaum is a playwright. Her works have been produced at many theatres. In 2008 she was cited by the Utne Reader as one of “50 Visionaries Who Are Changing Your World” for her work with girls with disabilities. Nussbaum lives in Chicago. Good Kings Bad Kings is her first novel. She has written about disabled characters in fiction. Read more here.

Katharine Quarmby is a journalist, film-maker and disability rights campaigner. Most recently she has worked as an associate editor for Prospect magazine and written for the Economist. She has also worked as a producer on Panorama and Newsnight for the BBC and news-edited Disability Now. She has just published her first book, Scapegoat: Why We Are Failing Disabled People.

The Bookseller recently published an article Trade 'needs to do more to promote BAME authors'. Sathnam Sanghera, author of the memoir The Boy with the Topknot (Penguin) and the novel Marriage Material (William Heinemann), was taking part in a debate hosted by Spread the Word, the writer development agency for London, and social enterprise Words of Colour. Sanghera said, Black and Asian writers are “not allowed to be average”. Danuta Kean said that diversity was about “a future-proof business”, adding: “It is about publishing reflecting the world in which we live, not one of the 1950s.” Read more here.

Lists:

The British Blacklist, lists male and female authors, screenwriters, playwrights, poets and songwriters. You can find out more about the amazing wealth of UK writers of colour here.

The Bookbag, has almost 12,000 book reviews and features books from all the many walks of literary life. There are also lots of author interviews, and all sorts of top tens - all of which you can find on their features page. You can read a collection of LGBT reviews here.

Vid-bloggers:

Jen Campbell, is the author of the Sunday Times bestselling, Weird Things Customers Say in Bookshops series, its sequel, More Weird Things Customers Say in Bookshops, and The Bookshop Book. Jen is also an award winning poet and short story writer. Jen has an Ectrodactyly, a congential disorder and often has to put up with ignorant comments! This has not stopped her being a beautiful person and lover of books. In this vid-blog, she shares her philosophy, how to Be a Good Human and how books make us a better person. We hear about some of her favourite #diverse books here.

Holly Dunn, is a Graphic Designer and Book Designer who is passionate about properly representing authors' words through good design and of course books. Like Jen, she vid-blogs about books. Holly believes, the best way we can endorse reading diversely is to speak enthusiastically about our favourite writers from marginalised groups. She started the #readdiversely tag here.

This is just a tiny example of some amazing diverse conversations that are out in the world. Do join in the conversation today and share your amazing uniqueness, diverse authors and characters. 

Use the hastag #readdiverse2016

The Reviewers

Just recently a friend wondered how I found books to recommend. I told her, I tend to use Twitter. A lot of people that I speak to both via Social Media and person to person, complain that there is a lot of bilge out there and on Twitter in particular. So how do I filter the information? Of course it depends who and how many people you follow as to the amount of information that appears in your feed. One way to filter the stream of material is to make lists and divide your followers, which is possible on Twitter. 

My main interests via Twitter are literature, care leavers and libraries and I'm passionate about all three.

Once we are following accounts and people are following us back, we get into the business of trawling through the vast amounts of tweets and deciding what we want to read more about by following links. For me it is usually a new book that catches my eye or another library under threat or the government failing in their corporate parental role. And then there are literary events which are fun to attend, you get to hear an author speaking about their book/s and the writing process and you can choose to have your book signed. Twitter has changed the way we see authors, they are not hidden behind closed doors feverishly typing away anymore. Well they are, but they occasionally emerge on Twitter which means they are also accessible and we can have 140 character-type conversations.

Antonia Honeywell attended the Finchley Literary Festival in May, and was chatting to a member of the audience about the publishing world. I didn't have a clue what she was talking about. The publishing world is a mysterious entity to me. I know a bit about books and the authors I've read and that is mainly it. However, as I'm starting a Creative Writing PhD in September, I felt I should at least be a bit more aware of what is happening in the literary world. So I've been making more of an effort to keep an eye on book reviewers, debut novelists, and attend some literary events. 

One book reviewer in particular caught my eye, and that was Naomi Frisby @Frizbot - she is also doing a PhD and reviews books written by women – old and new, literary and commercial, fiction and non-fiction with the occasional YA title at the aptly named The Writes of Woman. If you want to learn about women and writing, this is the blog to look at. Naomi's In the Media section is an education all on its own.

Here are a few more girly reviewers:

A Life in Books @alifeinbooks picks out snippets of book news that interest her and hopefully others, She discusses some of the books and alert readers to titles that might not find themselves in the glare of the publicity spotlight. She tends to tweet about literary fiction and interesting debuts.

Women Writers, Women's Books @WomenWriters are an online literary magazine by and about contemporary women writers from around the world. 

JacquiWine's Journal @JacquiWine interests includes a range of literary fiction, both contemporary and older works – novels, novellas and short story collections. As well as the occasional non-fiction book, Jacqui is particularly interested in world lit/literature in translation, anything noirish/hardboiled and relatively modern classics. 

And now for some boys:

Tony's Reading List @tony_malone focuses on fiction in translation. German and French writing (mostly in the original language) and Japanese literature (AKA J-Lit!), plus taking in the best the world has to offer, including an increasing amount of Korean fiction over the past year or so.

Savidge Reads @SavidgeReads Simon Savidge is a book-a-holic, and blogs about older stuff, lesser known writes, quirky and the more contemporary literary big reads (though not all of them). Simon was a judge for this year's Jerwood Fiction Uncovered. He's also a Persephone fan. 

Eric Karl Anderson @LonesomeReader Avid reader, writer and book reviewer of contemporary literary fiction as well as first time novelists and slightly more experimental fiction. His favourite author is Joyce Carol Oates.

And finally:

Words of Colour @wordsofcolour is the only UK-based, black, Asian and minority ethnic (BAME) led agency that supports writers from the main professional writing industries (creative writing, journalism, online writing, scriptwriting, plays and poetry). Includes book reviews, interviews and what's going on.

Read in Colour @readincolour US Blog about writers of colour including African-American, Asian and Latina. Ghana, India, Nigeria and Zimbabwe plus WOC for children and YA.

The Bookseller @thebookseller is the UK's definitive book industry magazine and website. News, analysis, Nielsen BookScan sales charts, jobs, Buyer's guides, and more.

Guardian Books @GuardianBooks has the latest information about books including prizes, News, Talking Points, Non-Fiction Reviews, Fiction and Poetry Reviews, People, Regulars, Children's Books, Pictures, Video and Audio, You may have missed section and popular hits within the books section.

I hope my tips and lists help you manoeuvre your way round the interesting though slightly confusing world of the Twitterspere.

Happy Reading!

By the People for the People

The Not the Booker Prize

In an effort to “get people talking about books, to promote previously unknown authors and to reward some quality books,” The Guardian called upon its readers to nominate their own choices for their favorite books of the year, stating in a July 29, 2009 article: “The judges of Britain’s most prestigious literary award pick the wrong book far too often. But who could be trusted to make a better choice? Why, the readers...of course.” Voila! The Not the Booker Prize was born. A sort of literary referendum by the reading public for the reading public.

*   *   *   *   *   *

I was very pleased to see Tasha Kavanagh's book Things We Have in Common (Canongate) on the Not the Booker list as I had heard Tasha reading an excerpt at the Finchley Literary Festival and found myself intrigued. 

Things We Have in Common is a creepy tale of loneliness and teenage obsession, described by its publisher as “Sue Townsend meets Zoë Heller”, with overtones of Emma Donoghue’s Room.

From the first sentence, I found myself sucked into a story that had me on edge. The narrative shifts between creepy, poignant and darkly humourous were overwhelming at times.

'I typed How to spot a paedophile into Google on my laptop. About a billion sites came up. I took a quiz on one. It showed pictures of people (men mostly) and you had to click Yes for paedophile or No for not a paedophile. I only got half of them right, which technically means there was a 50 per cent chance I was wrong about you.'

Kavanagh has captured the voice of the teenage outsider, the misfit, one who is overweight and living with a stepfather whom she dislikes whilst all the time missing her father who died the year before. She is ostracised and bullied by fellow classmates who are really cruel, the thing that gets her through is a massive crush on a fellow pupil, the pretty and popular Alice. With the help of her imagination, she makes up situations that cast her as a heroine and a much-wanted object of love.

Kavanagh writes the novel entirely from Yasmin's point of view in second person. Yasmin speaks to a man with a dog, who she calls `You' and whom she suspects wants to abduct the lovely Alice. Yasmin's story is essentially very sad but also disturbing, at times the reader is unsure of her reliability as she is prone to lying and being very secretive.

As a detective reader, I suspected how the novel was going to end but I was hugely surprised which is a good thing.

Yasmin’s young voice is so spot on, brilliantly realistic, whilst still being naive, optimistic and extremely fragile. The book is so well written that I felt at times I was prying into a young girls diary. It is a clever book and will keep the reader glued and guessing until the last page. 

*   *   *   *   *   *

Things we have in Common made the Not the Booker shortlist:

Kirstin Innes – Fishnet (Freight Books)

Kat Gordon – The Artificial Anatomy of Parks (Legend Press)

Oliver Langmead – Dark Star (Unsung Stories)

Paul McVeigh – The Good Son (Salt)

Tasha Kavanagh – Things We Have in Common (Canongate)

Melanie Finn - Shame (Weidenfeld & Nicolson)

and now it's time for the Not the Booker Prize final judgment. Vote here