On 15 January 1970, the Nigerian-Biafran war ended. Over two and a half years, there had been more than 100,000 military casualties, with between 500,000 and two million civilians either murdered or dead from starvation. It was a war that involved France, Israel, the Soviet Union and Britain. It was fought over the kind of ethnic and religious tensions that still divide so many of us today, alongside, inevitably, oil. It was a cataclysmic tragedy. And yet, as Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie says, it is a conflict that “we seem determined to forget.” Which makes it all the more important that we should try to engage with her “way of remembering”, Half Of A Yellow Sun.

Published in 2006, when Adichie was not yet 30, this novel is well on the way to classic status. It won the Orange prize for fiction in 2007 and was described by Maya Jaggi here in the Guardian as “a landmark novel” and by Janet Maslin as “enthralling” in the New York Times. It has since sold hundreds of thousands of copies, adapted into a not-entirely-successful film and, just a few weeks ago, made the top 10 in the Guardian’s list of the best books of the 21st century.

That’s the broad outline of the facts and figures, which are impressive – but don’t give a full impression of what matters about this novel. There’s a reason it has moved so many readers. Adichie says that when she started writing Half of a Yellow Sun, she “hoped that emotional truth would be its major recognisable trait.” It is a book about individual people as much as the sweep of war. It takes us behind the statistics and into real horror, as well as to surprising joys and moments of beauty.

“We read not to see how other people are like us, but simply to see them, to truly see them,” Adichie also said at the Hay festival in 2012. “What they love, what they resent, what wounds their pride, what they aspire to. Yet part of that magic of realist literature is also to remind us how similar we are in the mist of our differences. To remind us that what we all share is the quest for value…”

That quest feels like a very good way to start the new decade here on the Reading group. And so too does this fine novel. It may make you look at things you are unwilling to see and that are painful to know, but you will not regret reading Half Of A Yellow Sun. I hope you’ll join me.

Thanks to publisher 4th Estate, we have five copies to give to the first five people from the UK to post “I want a copy please”, along with a nice, constructive thought in the comments section below. If you’re lucky enough to be one of the first to comment, email the lovely folk on culture.admin@theguardian.com, with your address and your account username so they can track you down.