“This absorbing account by a young man who, as a boy of 12 , gets swept up in Sierra Leone’s civil war surpasses the best journalistic efforts in revealing the life and mind of a child abducted into the horrors of warfare.” —Publishers Weekly

• Globe and Mail Best 100 Books of the Year
• New York Times Book Review 100 Notable Books of the Year
• Publishers Weekly Best Books of the Year

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 and war. 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.