Roses and Bullets by Akachi Adimora-Ezeigbo
Roses and Bullets is a tale of young lovers caught up in the vortex of war; it is also a story of a nation reeling in the bangs and pains of ethnic irredentism and primordial sentiment; it refracts a real situation, where a nation’s future and hope (roses) were brought down by incendiary bullets of hate and disunity; and it deals with a nation’s saga in which its fallen roses (children, the brightest and most talented) inexorably stare the people in the face as well as engraft moral scare on the conscience of this nation. The ‘roses’ symbolise the generation to come as well as future of the nation, while bullets imagise war and fierce battle. Akachi Adimora-Ezeigbo’s thematic preoccupation in this long novel is to paint picturesquely the futility of Nigeria-Biafra war (1967-1970), which killed millions of Nigerian people, and children as well as its attendant upshot in Nigeria’s nation-building project and the costly price two innocent lovers paid for this human error.