Long Way Gone Pb The True Story of a Child Soldier

'A corrosive, eloquent and illuminating account of a child soldier's life, and it makes you look at the news with a fresh eye. What he has done is to make his situation imaginable for us, and stop us from simply turning away in horror. That is the best gift he could give the world.' Hilary Mantel

'Gives the war a painfully human dimension and reminds us of its pointlessness...If the pathos of this book helps to persuade the puppeteers of the estimated 300,000 child soldiers fighting today to put down their guns, then Beah will have done more than all those A47s ever have.' The Times

'A lucid, pensive, beautifully written account of a madness that he has the bravery to revisit head-on.' TLS

'Few of those boy soldiers have told their story as eloquently as Ishmael Beah.' Sunday Telegraph

'The arming of children is one of the greatest evils of the modern world, and yet we know so little about it because the children themselves are swallowed up by the very wars they are forced to wage. Ishmael Beah has not only emerged intact from this chaos, he has become one of its most eloquent chroniclers. "A Long Way Gone" is one of the most important war stories of our generation. We ignore its message at our peril.' Sebastian Junger

'A ferocious and desolate account of how ordinary children were turned into professional killers.' The Guardian

'Beah makes no excuses for his actions and is entirely lacking in self pity, but the honesty of his memoir reveals the full horror of a war in which the brutalisation of children was commonplace...Beah is a living testament to the endurance of the human spirit.' Sunday Times

'Ishmael Beah has achieved the seemingly impossible task of helping us to imagine the reality behind the statistics by empathising with just one of the many thousands of children who are soldiers around the world - a remarkable book.' The Guardian