When Obinna's village is attacked by the rebel army, he witnesses violence beyond the capacity of his imagination and comprehension. His father murdered, Obinna finds himself in the hands of the rebel army, to be shaped into an agent of this horror, to become a child soldier. Marched through minefields and thrown into battlefields, enduring daily existence in camp with a man called Priest and a woman called Christmas, Obinna slowly works out which parts of himself to save and which to sacrifice in this world turned upside down. Announcing the arrival of an important new African voice, Beneath the Darkening Sky is a terrifyingly powerful portrait of the boy soldier Majok Tulba could have become. Like all great fiction, it imagines the unimaginable and through the power of storytelling, unflinchingly shows us not just what can happen in our world, but how it does happen.
