Beasts of No Nation
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| Author | Uzodinma Iweala |
|---|---|
| Publisher | |
| Released | 2005 |
Beasts of No Nation is a 2005 novel by Uzodinma Iweala.
The novel follows the journey of a young boy, Agu, who is forced to join a group of soldiers in an unnamed West African country. While Agu fears his commander and many of the men around him, his fledgling childhood has been brutally shattered by the war raging through his country, and he is at first torn between conflicting revulsion and fascination with the mechanics of war. Iweala does not shy away from explicit, visceral detail, and paints a complex, difficult picture of Agu as a child soldier.
Iweala is a Nigerian-born, American-educated author. While the book does not give any direct clue as to which country it takes place in, there are several details which suggest it is in Nigeria. The book is notable for its confrontational, immersive first-person narrative; Agu speaks in an idiosyncratic cadence of English that mimics sentence structure and expressions in a number of languages spoken in Nigeria.
