Moses, Citizen & Me

Publication date: 2005
Publisher: Granta Books (2005)
ISBN: 186207741X

Moses, Citizen & Me

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.