English language
Published Aug. 13, 2022 by Penguin Publishing Group.
While he was still a little boy, Ilyas was stolen from his parents by the German colonial troops. After years away, he returns to his village to find his parents gone, and his sister Afiya given away. Another young man returns to the town he once lived in. Hamza was not stolen for the war, but fled into it to escape a life of bondage. In the war he has grown up at the right hand of an officer whose protection has marked him for life. With nothing but the clothes on his back, he seeks only work and security - and the love of the beautiful Afiya. As fate knots these young people together, as they live and work and fall in love, the shadow of a new war on another continent lengthens and darkens, ready to snatch them up and carry them away.
I kept waiting for something terrible to happen to the characters but nothing ever did, what a relief that was
I learned a lot about German colonization of east Africa around the turn of the 20th century, but that wasn’t enough for me to find the book particularly compelling.
