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 [1], Chiwetel Ejiofor [2], Anika Noni Rose, Joseph Mawle and John Boyega, who starred last year in as the young male lead in Attack the Block [3]. 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.