"This absorbing account by a young man who, as a boy of 12 , gets swept up in Sierra Leone’s civil war surpasses the best journalistic efforts in revealing the life and mind of a child abducted into the horrors of warfare." —Publishers Weekly

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• Publishers Weekly Best Books of the Year

It is estimated that in the more than fifty violent conflicts going on worldwide, there are some 300,000 child soldiers. Ishmael Beah useds to be one of them.

In A Long Way Gone, Beah, now in his mid-twenties, tells how, at the age of twelve, he fled attacking rebels in his homeland of Sierra Leone and wandered a land rendered unrecognizable by violence and war. By thirteen, he’d been picked up by the government army, and Beah, at heart a gentle boy, found that he was capable of truly terrible acts. This is a rare and mesmerizing account, told with real literary force and heartbreaking honesty.

Ishmael Beah was born in Sierra Leone, West Africa. He spent three years as a boy soldier before he was rehabilitated. He came to the United States at 17 and now lives in New York City. He is a member of Human Rights Watch Children’s Division Advisory Committee and Unicef advocate for children. He lives in New York.