As an important turning point in Nigerian history, the civil war (1967–70) remains a topic that engages writers and novelists. This translated and updated version of the author's doctoral thesis (2006), inspired by her discovery of the long critical neglect of women's Nigerian civil war literature, is a reminder that the author's research was strengthened by five years of fieldwork (1988–93) and lecturing at the University of Nigeria in Nsukka, once Biafra's university. This research time in situ gave Marion Pape the opportunity to familiarize herself with Igboland and women's literature on the war, including a number of unpublished works that she was privileged to access. Right from the start, she rightly reminds her readers of the fact that the war remains a point of reference in today's Nigeria. The pages devoted to an overview of the period (pp. 37–40), her assessment of the situation and paragraph on Biafran propaganda might be considered as somehow biased, but her assessment of the post-war situation is far more nuanced, with an interesting analysis of the terms used to describe the killings that triggered the mass exodus of the Igbo back to their ancestral land in 1966–67. This same attention to the text is shown elsewhere, in her study of the paratext to further facilitate the understanding of the works considered. The three chapters of her book cover the historical background to the war, survey its representations, and suggest the ensuing shift from civil war to gender war. For Pape, and contrary to what critics of Nigerian literature on the war might have suggested, Nigerian women writers, and Igbo women in particular, ‘do have a mouth’ (p. 1), address both male and female issues, and ‘insist on women's rights to have a say in all areas of public and private life’ (p. 30). It is a fact that, although the corpus of literature on the war has grown steadily to more than 150 works, women's input was widely ignored until Adichie's Half of a Yellow Sun (2006), something that is attributed here to the threat these texts posed to their male counterparts whose writings came out first. The book confirms the war as a central theme in Nigerian literature and stresses the need among writers ‘to come to terms with traumatic experiences, to reflect upon and account for their won roles in the war, and to document and analyse the changes … brought about in social and gender relations’ (p. 3).

Pape reads Nigerian civil war literature as a gender dialogue, often comparing male and female authors' texts to highlight their presentation of women and to show ‘how women experienced the war “as women” and how they represent it!’ (p. 11). She retraces the evolution of the role of women, their struggle to ensure their families' survival at all costs and their individual and communal contribution to the war effort, as home-makers and traders in particular – a role strengthened by war conditions. The book reveals issues of sexual violence linked to trade and women's active participation in social affairs during the war, and highlights this as an area of disagreement between male and female writers, with women's texts focusing on women's moral strength. One may not entirely agree with the author's connection between gender war and civil war in literary representations, or with her presentation of the new woman emerging from the war experience, influenced by Mammy Water and fighting, no longer for Biafra but for her own and her family's survival. The change Pape presents from a yam-bound culture to a cassava-bound culture and its impact on gender relations, reflecting the cultural division between male and female crops, might equally be controversial. But the book has many qualities, such as the balanced presentation of the Igbo and ‘the other side’.

One of the author's aims is ‘to evaluate the body of civil war prose fiction by women as a whole’ (p. 52); although Pape insists on the fact that this work is still in progress, as ‘the war is to this day far from being a closed issue, and new texts are constantly being published’ (p. 52), her book definitely adds to existing research on writers such as Adimora-Ezeigbo, Egejuru, Kalu, Ofoegbu and others, often either ignored or sidelined. For Adichie, ‘what should be remembered is the Igbo perspective on the war’ (p. 69); most female writers have a partisan attitude and could be said to ensure ‘the continuation of the war by literary means’ (p. 73). Pape brings to light a number of facts: first, the heterogeneity of the texts, and the near absence of any distinct female or ethnic perspective on the war – only the writers' ages and the dates of publication make some difference to their stance on Biafra, the younger writers' loyalty to the Biafran cause being traced partly to the widespread and lasting feeling of frustration among Igbo. Then there are a number of shared similarities: comparable experiences, modesty in presentation, a desire to set the record straight and pass on valuable lessons learned to the next generation, and a renewed interest in the local and its traditional values. We may conclude with the author that ‘the civil war will certainly continue to be a dominant theme in Nigeria's literary output of both men and women writers. With their willingness to negotiate and their focus on the shifting of gender roles during and after the war, women have added an essential complement to the initially male-dominated corpus of Nigerian civil war literature’ (p. 157).