Uwem Akpan's first published short story, "An Ex-mas Feast," appeared in The New Yorker's Debut Fiction issue in 2005. The story's portrait of a family living together in a makeshift shanty in urban Kenya, and their attempts to find gifts of any kind for the impending Christmas holiday, gives a matter-of-fact reality to the most extreme circumstances — and signaled the arrival of a breathtakingly talented writer.

"My Parents' Bedroom" is a Rwandan girl's account of her family's struggles to maintain a facade of normalcy amid unspeakable acts. In "Fat-tening for Gabon," a brother and sister cope with their uncle's attempt to sell them into slavery. "Luxurious Hearses" creates a microcosm of Africa within a busload of refugees and introduces us to a Muslim boy who summons his faith to bear a treacherous ride through Nigeria. "What Language Is That?" reveals the emotional toll of the Christian-Muslim conflict in Ethiopia through the eyes of childhood friends.

Every story is a testament to the wisdom and resilience of children, even in the face of the most agonizing situations our planet can offer.

"Nigerian-born Jesuit priest Akpan transports the reader into gritty scenes of chaos and fear in his rich debut collection of five long stories set in war-torn Africa. 'An Ex-mas Feast' tells the heartbreaking story of eight-year-old Jigana, a Kenyan boy whose 12-year-old sister, Maisha, works as a prostitute to support her family. Jigana's mother quells the children's hunger by having them sniff glue while they wait for Maisha to earn enough to bring home a holiday meal. In 'Luxurious Hearses,' Jubril, a teenage Muslim, flees the violence in northern Nigeria. Attacked by his own Muslim neighbors, his only way out is on a bus transporting Christians to the south. In 'Fattening for Gabon,' 10-year-old Kotchikpa and his younger sister are sent by their sick parents to live with their uncle, Fofo Kpee, who in turn explains to the children that they are going to live with their prosperous 'godparents,' who, as Kotchikpa pieces together, are actually human traffickers. Akpan's prose is beautiful and his stories are insightful and revealing, made even more harrowing because all the horror — and there is much — is seen through the eyes of children." Publishers Weekly (Starred Review) (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)

The parents in Uwem Akpan's first collection of stories, set in present-day Africa, make sacrifices and deals that might seem unimaginable to readers in other parts of the world. After finishing this book, I wandered for days staring at my three daughters and countless nephews and nieces, seeing how fragile and dangerous their lives could easily become in a time of war, starvation and betrayal.

... Washington Post Book Review (read the entire Washington Post review) What if the sacrifice of our own lives weren't enough to ensure the survival of our progeny? That is often the case in Akpan's Africa. These five stories — set in Nigeria, Kenya, Rwanda, Ethiopia and Benin — are all about children and their perilous, confusing lives, their searches for bits of grace and transcendence along with food, family and survival. This link allows a huge, perplexing continent to be known in intimate ways. The first story, "An Ex-mas Feast," is told by Jigana, an 8-year-old boy living with his parents and siblings in an improvised shack in the slums outside Nairobi. His 12-year-old sister, Maisha, is a veteran prostitute who has amassed a collection of secret treasures inside a locked trunk, which their mother maneuvers around the shack while she tries to take care of her other five children. She sends out the older two with Baby, who is a begging tool, and gives Jigana "New Suntan shoe glue" to kill his hunger. "I watched her decant the kabire into my plastic 'feeding bottle.' ... The last stream of the gum entering the bottle weakened and braided itself before tapering in midair like an icicle."

Akpan, a Jesuit priest born in Nigeria, teaching now in Zimbabwe after earning his MFA from the University of Michigan, researched the lives of the children he writes about, but no amount of research produces the perfect details and images that he has set down here; only imagination, empathy and a careful ear can accomplish this. The details of street life in Nairobi — girls who bleach their faces at age 10 to stand on street corners and be picked up by white men and tourists — and of the way Western ideas have insinuated themselves into every aspect of African life are on convincing display here. These characters speak a lingua franca that changes with each nation, but English words and American capitalism are everywhere.

"No food, tarling," Mama tells Jigana. "We must to finish to call the names of our people." Jigana's mother commands her husband to help consecrate a ceremony that involves holding the coverless Bible inscribed with the names of their relatives, people dead and disappeared due to razed villages, tribal conflicts, mistaken identity and sexual slavery. Her prayer ends with, "Christ, you Ex-mas son, give Jigana a big, intelligent head in school."

In "Fattening for Gabon," an uncle is charged with the care of his niece and nephew when their parents are sickened by AIDS. He plans to sell them into slavery, but, in an agonizing meltdown, he cannot go through with the deal. The language in this story is a melange as well, in which yearning and tradition seem painfully melded. The nephew, Kotchikpa, who is 10, meets the Gabon trader for the first time in his uncle Fofo Kpee's yard: " 'Smiley Kpee, only two?' the man who brought Fofo exclaimed, disappointed. 'No way, iro o! Where oders?'

"'Ah non, Big Guy, you go see oders ... beaucoup,' said Fofo, a chuckle escaping his pinched mouth. He turned to us: "Mes enfants, hey, una no go greet Big Guy?'"

This story is long, but like the other four it manages to capture a whole nation and how that nation has been affected by border strife, AIDS, international peacekeepers, internal tribal conflicts and even family fights.

"Luxurious Hearses" is a journey into a nightmare world in Nigeria, where Muslims in the north are rampaging against Christians who are fleeing to the south where their religion is more dominant and where the inhabitants are killing Muslims. The buses that ply the highways are now thronging with refugees from both sides, including Jubril, a teenage Muslim boy whose hand was recently amputated when he stole food. He's another child caught between worlds, and the world of this bus is huge, with tribal elders, former soldiers, university students and desperate mothers pressing against every window.

We are soon thrust into another desperate journey, another fateful decision and another world expertly limned by Akpan. On the stalled bus, waiting for fuel, the crowded passengers fight over the televisions showing corpses and fighting from Khamfi, in the south:

"I say everybody shut up," a passenger named Emeka yells. "I dey watch my people do combat! You get relative who dey do Schwarzenegger for cable TV before?"

But then Nigerian police show up and turn off the television. "'Please, show me my cousin!' Emeka said, tears running down his face. 'Please, return to that channel. ... I want to see my cousin again! Is he alive?' The police did not even look at him. 'Officer, I'll give you whatever you want later ...'

"'Later? We no dey do later for cable TV,' the police said, watching Emeka's hands like a dog expecting its owner to offer something. 'Give us de money now now. ... Cable TV, life action ... e-commerce!'"

The final story may be the most devastating of all, in its depiction of a Rwandan family — Hutu father, Tutsi mother and their two children for whom they make the ultimate sacrifice. It is not merely the subject that makes Akpan's story or his writing so astonishing, translucent and horrifying all at once; it is his talent with metaphor and imagery, his immersion into character and place. The view from a child's eyes carries the reader directly into Africa and the lives of the child narrators. One of these is Monique, daughter of two tribes, in "My Parents' Bedroom." She says of her friend, who is Twa, the smallest, most ignored tribe: "Helene is an orphan, because the Wizard fixed her parents last year. Mademoiselle Angeline said that he cursed them with AIDS by throwing his gris-gris over their roof. Now Papa is paying Helene's school fees." After the massacre begins, Monique watches her parents rescue the girl: "Helene is soaked in blood and has been crawling through the dust. Her right foot is dangling on strings, like a shoe tied to the clothesline by its lace."

Helene is put into the attic, with the Tutsi relatives of Monique's mother, and when her father's Hutu family arrives, he is forced to make a terrible choice. This choice, as happens so often in this collection, is death for life. Akpan's incredible talent as a writer prevents the story from becoming a polemic, diatribe or object lesson. He is too good for that. The story stays firmly focused on Monique and that house with the desperately crowded attic: "I cry with the ceiling people until my voice cracks and my tongue dries up."

Uwem Akpan has given these children their voices, and for the compassion and art in his stories I am grateful, and changed.

Susan Straight's most recent novel, "A Million Nightingales," is the first of a trilogy on slavery and motherhood.

Reviewed by Susan Straight, Washington Post Book World (Copyright 2006 Washington Post Book World Service/Washington Post Writers Group)
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"[A] startling debut collection....[Akpan] fuses a knowledge of African poverty and strife with a conspicuously literary approach to storytelling, filtering tales of horror through the wide eyes of the young." Janet Maslin, New York Times

"Awe is the only appropriate response to Uwem Akpan's stunning debut...a collection of five stories so ravishing and sad that I regret ever wasting superlatives on fiction that was merely very good. (Grade: A)" Entertainment Weekly

"Haunting prose. Unrelenting horror. An almost unreadable must-read." Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

"All the promise and heartbreak of Africa today are brilliantly illuminated in this debut collection." Seattle Post-Intelligencer

"Uwem Akpan's brilliant Say You're One of Them proves that great fiction often can reveal more truth than a whole shelf of memoirs and histories....Akpan creates an extraordinary portrait of modern Africa with his debut short-story collection." USA Today

"Akpan has demonstrated the true talent of a fiction writer: He is a gifted storyteller capable of bringing to life myriad characters and points of view....[T]he result is admirable, artistically as well as morally." The Christian Science Monitor

"Juxtaposed against the clarity and revelation in Akpan's prose — as translucent a style as I've read in a long while — we find subjects that nearly render the mind helpless and throw the heart into a hopeless erratic rhythm out of fear, out of pity, out of the shame of being only a few degrees of separation removed from these monstrous modern circumstances." Alan Cheuse, The Chicago Tribune

"African writer and Jesuit priest Uwem Akpan depicts the plight of African children with the kind of restraint only possible when an author fully inhabits his characters — he manages to be empathetic without being condescending." The Village Voice

From a portrait of a family living together in a makeshift shanty in urban Kenya to a Rwandan girl's account of her family's struggles to maintain normalcy amid unspeakable horrors, each of the short stories in this collection is a testament to the wisdom and resilience of children.

Uwem Akpan was born in a village in Nigeria and currently teaches in Zimbabwe. After studying philosophy and English at Creighton and Gonzaga universities, he studied theology for three years at the Catholic University of East Africa. He was ordained as a Jesuit priest in 2003 and received his MFA in creative writing from the University of Michigan in 2006. "My Parents' Bedroom," a story included in this, his first collection, was one of five short stories by African writers chosen as finalists for The Caine Prize for African Writing.