Song for Night is a first-person tale of lost identity, suffering, and displacement. My Luck became a solider at age 12 after witnessing the murders of his Islam-convert father and stoic mother. My Luck is now 15. He is small for his age and very smart. He was trained to detect and defuse land mines. To ensure that My Luck and his brave comrades, including Ijeoma, the girl My Luck loves, remain quiet no matter what happens, the troop leaders have cut their vocal chords.

Chris Abani spares us no shocking detail, he writes about rape, point-blank executions of innocent women and children, cannibalism, the last moments of the life of a girl soldier reduced to a bloody torso. When your shock subsides you are reminded that these very horrors are part of this thing we call life.

We quickly learn that My Luck has seen life way beyond his years. He like many of us is full of complexities. He has cut crosses into his arm for each of his lost loved ones, and he has sliced X’s into his flesh to mark each person he “enjoyed killing.” Even with all this My Luck has not lost his moral compass and his capacity for wonder and love.

He learned to crochet when his mother was alive, happy to create, knot-by-knot, a “wide but strong web.” She died hiding him. Ijeoma comforted him after he was forced to rape a captive but she is killed when she steps on a mine. My Luck muses, “even with the knowledge that there are some sins too big for even God to forgive, every night my sky is still full of stars; a wonderful song for night.”

Stay tuned for our exclusive interview with Chris Abani in March.