The award-winning novel Half of a Yellow Son by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is to be turned into a film. Shooting has just begun in Nigeria, where the director is Nigerian theatre director, playwright and novelist Biyi Bandele, who has also adapted the novel as a screenplay.

The cast features a wealth of British talent including Thandie Newton, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Anika Noni Rose, Joseph Mawle and John Boyega, who starred last year in as the young male lead in Attack the Block. Nigerian actors include Onyeka Onwenu, Genevieve Nnaji and Zack Orji.

Half of a Yellow Sun, which won the Orange Prize for Fiction in 2007, tells of the romantic paths taken by two twins (Newton and Rose) from a well-to-do Nigerian family who, after a private English education return to newly independent 1960s Nigeria, only for their lives to be caught up in political turmoil and war.