Adichie has named Achebe repeatedly and specifically, including the detail that her family lived for a time in the house on the Nsukka campus that the Achebes had lived in before them. What Half of a Yellow Sun takes from him is the premise that the novel of Nigeria should be written from inside it and in English that does not apologise for being Nigerian: Achebe's argument in Things Fall Apart and in his essays was that the language could be made to carry the weight of another culture rather than translating it away. The subject matter is also a continuation. Achebe's trilogy ends with the corruption of the early independence years, and Adichie's novel begins from there and goes into the Biafran war that Achebe himself lived through and wrote about in poems and, much later, in a memoir.
