Song for Night is a powerful piece of prose portraying the shocking experiences of an African boy soldier. ‘My Luck’ belongs to a team trained to defuse mines with jungle knives. They have their vocal chords severed so they are unable to distract each other with their frightened screams of failure. After just such an explosion, My Luck has been separated from his unit. As he wanders shell-shocked through the war-torn landscape, he recalls his journey out of childhood and into the excitement and brutality of war.

Nigerian author Chris Abani deftly depicts the thrill of the boy chosen to an ‘elite’ unit and the taste for murder he develops, akin to orgasm. The title of each chapter describes the sign language the soldiers created to communicate with each other, a language to describe the indescribable. They range from the tender, ‘Love Is a Backhanded Stroke to the Cheek’ to the hopeless ‘The Soul Has No Sign’. But despite the brutal and the unimaginable, My Luck has a capacity for love that is never extinguished. This is a powerful piece of writing, haunting and bleak, but with an uncanny glimmer of hope for the human spirit.