Beasts of No Nation

Blurb

Beasts of No Nation is a 2005 novel by Uzodinma Iweala that takes its title from the 1989 album of the same name by Fela Kuti.
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-American, Harvard-educated author, who attended St. Albans School in Washington, D.C., during his teenage years. While the book does not give any direct clue as to which country it takes place in, there are several details that 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.