If You Liked Ishmael Beah
...here's another two rewarding tales of struggle...
What is the What by Dave Eggers
What is the What is an extraordinary true account of life amid the madness of war and a tale of triumph in the face of extreme adversity, told with deep compassion and unexpected humour.
At the heart of this novel is a boy separated from his family by conflict and forced to leave his small Sudanese village joining thousands of other orphans on their long walk to Ethiopia to find safety –for a while. He encounters enemy soldiers, deadly militia, dangerous animals, disease and starvation –but his spirit will be tested in even greater ways than these.
Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
This acclaimed novel is the story of the years leading up to and the course of a vicious civil war in Nigeria in the late 1960s in which a million people died and thousands were massacred in cold blood. The three main characters in the novel get swept up in the violence during these turbulent years.
As their lives intersect, they have to question their own responses to the unfolding political events. This extraordinary novel is about Africa in a wider sense: about moral responsibility, about the end of colonialism, about ethnic allegiances, about class and race; and the ways in which love can complicate all of these things.
