"If she had died, if Odenigbo and Baby and Ugwu had died, the bunker would still smell like a freshly tilled farm and the sun would still rise and the crickets would still hop around. The war would continue without them. Olanna exhaled, filled with a frothy rage. It was the very sense of being inconsequential that pushed her from extreme fear to extreme fury. She had to matter." 
 For the first few pages, this reminded me of a social novel, a novel of manners, like which Adichie demonstrates in Americana. The story begins with a young houseboy, a live-in servant brought from the countryside named Ugwu. There are two twin sisters, Olenna and Kainene, who could not be more different in their tastes. Olenna starts up an affair with a radical university professor, Kainene becomes interested in a British writer ostensibly here to write about Igbo pottery. This is an interesting premise in peacetime - the intellectuals talk about what Africa and Nigeria are, the two sisters find places for themselves, the houseboy is shocked by the existence of electricity and refigeration. Richard, the Englishman, probably likes this place, but feels himself an outsider to it. 
 Then there is a coup in 1966, where the country's first prime minister is shot, along with several of his colleagues. A military government takes over dominated by Muslim northern officers. By next year, the country is in civil war, as the more Christian Igbo in the southeast chafe under military rule, and the novel begins its long descent into hell. 
 It is brutal in its detail, and I won't go too much into it; it won't talk or moralize in the abstract and the details are horrifying and sometimes horribly familiar. A little girl has a swollen belly - it might be pregnancy or kwashiorkor. We see traumatized soldiers, mass looting of shops and houses, and severed heads in boxes, with their braids still neatly tied. But to say this is a blood and guts novel understates the scope of Adichie's approach. She maintains a strong current of empathy, which does not grant absolution to people, nor does she demonize them. The world is hard and cruel, and people are complicit or cannot resist it, and she gives the most honorable and good characters their sins and the most foul ones their causes and pleasant justifications. 
 Identity and the shifting sense of self. Identity is private and public - what you tell your neighbors is different from what you tell your parents or your spouse or your children, which is different from what you think about yourself. 
 On top of personal identity, there is tribal allegiance, political affiliation, or national. Of course the nation itself is a creation of British imperialism, but the intellectuals of Nigeria debate whether there is such a thing as 'black' which is more than 'not-white', as there are so many other identities out there - and in all of these different tribal/ethnic groups but still there is enough difference in the distribution and use of power that one resents and fears the other. 
 What else is there to say about this book? It is a Nigerian's attempt to look back upon the bloody past which is still there, in a sense, even if she has never lived through it. It is an exposition of ordinary persons in the 'ordinary' or at least unrelenting battery of war. It is a mastery of the grand picture of war and the details. 
 Ugwu thanked him and shook his head and realized that he would never be able to capture that child on paper, never be able to describe well enough the fear that dulled the eyes of mothers in the refugee camp when the bomber planes charged out of the sky. He would never be able to depict the very bleakness of bombing hungry people. But he tried, and the more he wrote the less he dreamed.