Moses, Citizen & Me

Publisher: Granta Books (2005)
ISBN: 186207741X

When Julia flies into war-scarred Sierra Leone from London, she is apprehensive about seeing her uncle Moses for the first time in twenty years. But nothing could have prepared her for her encounter with her eight-year-old cousin, Citizen, a former child soldier, and for the shocking truth of what he has done.

Driven by a desire to understand Citizen, Julia takes the disturbed child into the rainforest, where to her surprise, she encounters him amongst other child soldiers, along with a mysterious storyteller, Bemba G. Is he a shaman, teacher, wizard or magician? He alone in the heart of the rainforest can heal the rift between the cultures of war and peace, Europe and Africa. But who would think he'd use Shakespeare to do it?

Moses, Citizen & Me is a work of imagination about the conflict in Sierra Leone; a novel which draws on both the European canon and African oral traditions to illuminate the sufferings of child soldiers and their families.

Read Delia's reflections on writing Moses, Citizen & Me
Delia's thoughts on winning the Orwell Prize

'Anyone who has spent time in Africa can immediately recognise the power and truth of her descriptions. It is a work of great intimacy and moral complexity, the kind of writing that sheds light on a world we barely understand...the book is one that Orwell himself might have liked.'

- Andrew O'Hagan for the Orwell Judges

'A deeply affecting and vividly told story of ordinary people with the courage to survive. Delia Jarrett-Macauley has excavated the pain and torment within the hidden recesses of the human soul and there uncovered, finally - love. A wonderful book...'

- Aminatta Forna

'This is a very serious and significant choice of subject matter for a debut novel; ambitiously rendered, it proves fertile and potent ground for fiction.'

- Bernadine Evaristo, Wasafiri

'In descriptive, sensual language, the novel charts an odyssey of destrcution and horror, but also of eventual redemption, and illustrates what can be accomplished by people who have the necessary courage, love and hope.'

- Irish Times Review

'An extraordinary novel about war, childhood, art and salvation. Shakespearean tragedy recast in modern Africa, transformed into a redemptive vision as magical as a midsummer night's dream.'

- Francis Wheen

'...her understated prose a foil to the bleak and disturbing subject matter. ...sensitively establishes the family as a microcosm of the ruptured nation.. and Shakespeare provides an inspirational and uplifting agent of therapy.'

- Literary Review

'Seven years ago Delia Jarrett-Macauley published The Life of Una Marson 1906-65, a landmark biography of the Jamaican feminist who became the BBC's first black programme maker. In her debut novel, Jarrett-Macauley again breaks ground with a delicate and brave....treatment of child soldiers in the aftermath of a west African civil war.'

- Maya Jaggi, The Guardian

'...the considered and multi-layered story of a Sierra Leone family blasted apart by one of its children turning boy soldier in the civil war. It is a novel remarkable for its slowed, measured pulse and its calm analysis, its keenness to promise hope and rehabilitation even after the worst.'

- Ali Smith, The Guardian Review

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