What is the nature of the everyday in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's second novel, Half of a Yellow Sun, given her determination ‘to write realistic fiction about a war’?

Her expressed sense of responsibility to something larger than art is what profoundly separates Half of a Yellow Sun from her first novel, Purple Hibiscus. While I could contest Adichie's implied fissure between art and the big, historical occurrences of ‘real’ life, including of war, what interests me here that she expresses an obligation to a degree of historical veracity in a fictional account of Biafra. And yet, in this novel she at times unwittingly falls back on dominant metaphors at the expense of depicting the concrete richness of material culture, which we saw her do so well in Purple Hibiscus. The focus of this chapter is to explore the context and the consequences of Adichie's increasing emphasis on the metaphoric in Half of a Yellow Sun.