Radiance of Tomorrow

By: Ishmael Beah
Location: FIC BEA
Genre: War- fiction. Africa, the hope and the struggle!

A haunting, beautiful first novel by the bestselling author of A Long Way Gone - the story of a boy Soldier.

This book is a brutal fairy tale.

Africa- a place close to my heart, I have not been to places ravaged by civil war, destroyed by greed or aligned by sectarianism. But I have spent time with African people who dream dreams, who hope, who know that education and a strong village life is what will build nations within the continent. Sierra Leone has not been so lucky as the nations I have visited and this story unpacks just how difficult it is to bring healing and hope to a fissured and broken world.  Then when the capitalists move in with their mines  a different corrupt war starts! This book deals with it all!

“We must live in the radiance of tomorrow, as our ancestors have suggested in their tales. For what is yet to come tomorrow has possibilities, and we must think of it, the simplest glimpse of that possibility of goodness. That will be our strength. That has always been our strength.” —

At the center of Radiance of Tomorrow are Benjamin and Bockarie, two longtime friends who return to their hometown, Imperi, after the civil war. The village is in ruins, the ground covered in bones. As more villagers begin to come back, Benjamin and Bockarie try to forge a new community by taking up their former posts as teachers, but they're beset by obstacles: a scarcity of food; a rash of murders, thievery, rape, and retaliation; and the depredations of a foreign mining company intent on sullying the town's water supply and blocking its paths with electric wires. As Benjamin and Bockarie search for a way to restore order, they're forced to reckon with the uncertainty of their past and future alike.

“Who can ever know what path to walk on when all of them are either crooked or broken? One just has to walk.”