Lost and found

When Starbucks in the United States decided to promote Ishmael Beah’s memoir of life as a boy soldier in Sierra Leone it seemed to many a surprising choice. A Long Way Gone, with its descriptions of atrocities and terror, is a far cry from the daily travails of footballers’ wives and celebratory chefs. But stories of boy soldiers, casualties of the civil wars endemic across parts of Africa and Asia, have, in recent years, become a growing branch of disaster literature, alongside memoirs of the Holocaust in occupied Europe, the great famine in China, the killing fields of Cambodia, and the contemporary tales of loss and abuse in Western life. Savagery and trauma are now popular reading.

Ishmael Beah writes simply and well.  He was a 12-year-old schoolboy who could recite Shakespeare and loved rap and hip- hop when, in 1993, he left his village in Sierra Leone with his elder brother and two friends to walk 16 miles to a nearby town to take part in a talent contest.