HALF OF A YELLOW SUN
by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Fourth Estate £14.99 pp437

THE INHERITANCE OF LOSS
by Kiran Desai
H Hamilton £16.99 pp326

Both these post-colonial writers have well-received debut novels behind them, and now re-enter the lists with stories of unrest and ethnic rivalry in recent history.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie deals with the Nigerian civil war of the 1960s. The main characters are twin rich-kid sisters: Olanna (beautiful and academic) who lives with a “revolutionary” maths lecturer, and Kainene (ugly and business-minded) who rather daringly shacks up with Richard, a British writer. Olanna “was like the stone that lay right below a gushing spring, rubbed smooth by years and years of sparkling water, and looking at her was similar to finding that stone . . . ”

It’s nice writing, but you can’t really have years of water, and there’s something rather clunky about “similar to”, which is put there to avoid a repetition of “like”, even though the repetition would have been preferable.

The sisters and their friends are Ibo, or Igbo as it’s spelt here, and their lives are horribly disrupted when the Hausa and the Yoruba decide to massacre the Igbo for the usual nonexistent reasons, and the Igbo leader Ojukwu (a colonel who promoted himself to general) sets up the doomed break-away republic of Biafra and brings down the wrath of the federal government upon it.

Despite its length, the novel sustains the interest with its engaging characters and its mostly artful simplicity of style. Apart from a staggeringly rude telephone operator — “Give me the number quick, I have other things to do” — there is scant intentional humour, but the author’s attitudes do provoke a certain grim hilarity. She claims that all African tribal enmities were wholly created by the white man — by promoting incompetent Hausa and Yoruba officers into army jobs that should, of course, all have gone to the more talented Igbo. She also claims that British academics at a named university “encouraged the massacres”, which probably ties in with her admission in an afterword that “my intent is to portray my own imaginative truths and not the facts”.

Richard, being white, is weedy in physique and temperament, wetting himself and vomiting at the first sign of trouble, and he suffers from, wait for it, sexual impotence. He feels grossly inferior to Kainene’s great friend, the virile and noble Colonel Madu. At the end, Madu punches the harmless Richard on the nose to show who’s boss and then kindly remarks, “I didn’t break it.”

Kiran Desai’s novel is set in Kalimpong, up “where India blurred into Bhutan and Sikkim”, in the mid-1980s. A retired judge lives in a decaying mansion with his cook, his dopey red setter bitch and Sai, his orphaned granddaughter. Sai is having a tentative romance with her maths tutor, Gyan. Unfortunately young Gyan gets caught up in the Nepali separatist movement and resents Sai because she’s Indian, convent- educated and English-speaking.

Desai’s interest in sexuality seems to hang on its potential for conflict. Sai and Gyan spend almost all of the novel biting each other’s heads off, and as for the flashbacks to the judge’s nightmare marriage, crikey. It makes for effective fiction, though, and the whole thing is informed by wit.

Salman Rushdie, who contributes a cover quote, is clearly an influence, occasionally too much of one. When the cook’s son Biju goes to the US embassy, would-be emigrants are rushing at the glass of the visa office counter, trying “to splat themselves against it hard enough that they would just stick and not scrape off”, a kind of cartoonery that may be best left to Rushdie himself. But the Himalayan setting is well done, and although Desai seems to lose her thread after about 100 pages, she does find it again, and it leads to a resolution both moving and bleakly comic.

Available at Sunday Times Books First prices of £13.49 (Adichie) and £15.29 (including p&p) on 0870 165 8585

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