The Tablet

Non-fiction in brief
David McLaurin
27 May 2006

Moses is an elderly photographer living in Freetown, Sierra Leone, which is just awaking from the stupor induced by civil strife. Citizen is his grandson, aged eight, who, as a chid soldier, has taken part in numerous atrocities and, we are told at the start, murdered his grandmother. For this reason, the narrator, Moses' niece, has come to Freetown from London.

The author is of Sierra Leonean parentage, and clearly wants to expose the horrors that the country has been through: the book moves through the landscape of Africa with great deliberation, as if in a dream - perhaps the only way such a story can be told.

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