Children Are Diamonds: An African Apocalypse - Hardcover

Edward Hoagland has written more than twenty books, including the travel memoirs Alaskan Travels and African Calliope, the essay collections Walking the Dead Diamond River and The Tugman’s Passage, and the novels Cat Man and Seven Rivers West. He worked in the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus while attending Harvard, and later traveled the world writing for a number of national magazines including Harper’s and Esquire. He has received numerous prestigious literary awards, and taught at many American colleges and universities. He is a native New Yorker, who now divides his time between Martha’s Vineyard and Burton, Vermont.

“The ferocious lucidity of Hoagland’s language and the depth of his characters as they navigate political complexity, hellish violence, endless fear, persistent desire, and desperate calculations of survival make for a shattering tale of epic suffering, bitter irony, and miraculous flashes of beauty.” (Booklist)

“A gritty cinematic story wrapped in brilliant African detail, mesmerizing, from the unforgettable opening scene, on to the end. Quite simply, a masterpiece.” (Garrison Keillor)

“Edward Hoagland has long been both a resolute explorer and a preternaturally versatile writer. He’s written more nonfiction than fiction, but what he brings to this terrifying novel—I mean, in addition to his humane vision and exquisite craft—is everything he has learned (as Graham Greene learned) from the world. The range and depth of Hoagland’s travel books, and of his many remarkable essays, are on display in this novel set in Africa, where killing and sexual brutality are juxtaposed with humanitarian care. Hoagland’s aid workers are damaged souls, but they haven’t quit. In a world of unbearable inhumanity, what comes across in this intrepid novel is the power of doing the right thing—even, or especially, in a moral outback.” (John Irving)

“Children Are Diamonds is the latest addition to a remarkable collection of books about the war in southern Sudan that evokes the time and place with haunting imagery. Hoagland aptly captures the lives of Western do-gooders and opportunists lured by the adrenaline rush of Africa, evoking the closeness, and the randomness, of death in a war zone.” (The New York Times)