Half of a Yellow Sun book cover
Cecilia Gaposchkin, Associate Professor of History, and Assistant Dean of Faculty for Pre-Major Advising
Topic 

The best book I have read in the last year is probably Half of a Yellow Sun. It is set in Nigeria during the Nigerian Civil War (1967–70). It is a wonderful, complex, heartbreaking, believable story, embedded in a historical context I knew pretty much nothing about.  I loved – and learned so much from – the portrait of the educated elite, the Nigerian university environment, and bourgeois life, as well as, of course, the heartbreaking events of the war itself. It is a masterpiece. I cannot recommend it highly enough.