Finalist! 2008 BC Booksellers’ Choice Award in Honour of Bill Duthie
A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier
by Ishmael Beah
Publisher: Douglas & McIntyre
It is estimated that in the more than fifty violent conflicts going on worldwide, there are some 300,000 child soldiers. Ishmael Beah used to be one of them. In A Long Way Gone, Beah, now in his mid-twenties, tells how, at the age of twelve, he fled attacking rebels in his homeland of Sierra Leone and wandered a land rendered unrecognizable by violence. By thirteen, he’d been picked up by the government army and Beah, at heart a gentle boy, found that he was capable of truly terrible acts. This is a rare and mesmerizing account, told with real literary force and heartbreaking honesty. Beah came to the United States at seventeen and now lives in New York City. He is a member of Human Rights Watch Children’s Division Advisory Committee and has spoken before the United Nations on several occasions. More