Half of a Yellow Sun The Nigerian civil war of the '60s is a living presence in this riveting tale of sexual betrayal. Half of a Yellow Sun : a broad canvas skilfully covered. Author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Genre Fiction Publisher Fourth Estate Pages 448 RRP $32.95 When I was growing up, it was Ethiopia's starving children we were exhorted to think of when we refused our broccoli or left chunks of meat on our plates. A decade earlier, Biafra played the equivalent role at dinner tables across the Western world. But for me, as for many others I suspect, the terms Ethiopian and Biafran were so impossibly distant, so far beyond my experience, that they could not properly matter, let alone promote the consumption of my peas. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's second novel, Half of a Yellow Sun , collapses the distance between Africa and the rest of the world, tracking the build-up towards and descent into civil war in Nigeria in the late 1960s, the creation of the short-lived state of Biafra and the deaths, by starvation and slaughter, of at least a million of Nigeria's Igbo population. The novel begins slowly, in a time referred to vaguely as "the early Sixties". In newly independent Nigeria, life borders on the idyllic if you are middle-class and educated: a ceaseless cycle of cashew trees, yam porridge and kola nut served on polished saucers. Odenigbo, maths lecturer at Nsukka University, has employed his first houseboy, Ugwu, and is about to set